Demolition

There are many reasons to be worried about the moral centre of Demolition, and none of those concerns the aforesaid friend, played by Jake Gyllenhaal as a vacuous Wall Street type looking for meaning after his wife dies in an accident.

It's a sad truth that Demolition will probably be forgotten. Movies like this usually are. But not by the few who saw it. Because it's hopeful, it uplifts and it makes promises. Who cares if it can keep them?

Demolition is first and foremost a movie about grief, and how everyone deals with it in different ways, but it's as unconventional as you can get, with a dark comic tone that mirrors something like Fight Club or American Psycho.  That means that it probably won't be for everyone, although it never enters territory quite as dark as either of those movies.

Both the director and Gyllenhaal work hard at keeping things believable and interesting. Gyllenhaal's performance is sincerely involved while Jean-Marc Vallée's narrative takes the unexpected path to evolved and involved recompense. Together they make this event a eminently worthy experience.

Plenty of metaphors - some unnecessary - but decent fare, on the whole.