★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallée. Jake Gyllenhaal finds some middle ground between the wiry disconnect of Nightcrawler’s Lou Bloom and the hefty grief of Southpaw’s Billy Hope as Davis Mitchell, an investment banker struggling with the recent loss of his wife. When informed by the doctor that she has passed, Davis retires to a closeby vending machine that fails to deliver his request. Frustrated and desperate to find an outlet for his confusion, he begins a series of letters to the vending company that become increasingly confessional, catching the eye of customer service rep, Karen (Naomi Watts), with whom he forms an odd connection. Here’s a peculiar morsel fromdirector Jean-Marc Vallée. Jake Gyllenhaal finds some middle ground between the wiry disconnect of’s Lou Bloom and the hefty grief of’s Billy Hope as Davis Mitchell, an investment banker struggling with the recent loss of his wife. When informed by the doctor that she has passed, Davis retires to a closeby vending machine that fails to deliver his request. Frustrated and desperate to find an outlet for his confusion, he begins a series of letters to the vending company that become increasingly confessional, catching the eye of customer service rep, Karen (Naomi Watts), with whom he forms an odd connection.





No-one could ever accuse Gyllenhaal of accepting roles that are ‘samey’, especially in the past three or four years. Just as characters like Bloom or Hope demand a physical change, Davis Mitchell requires a facial restraint that needs to convey the appropriate apathy (one moment sees him attempting to fake tears in the mirror), without teetering over into the realms of pure unlikability. Even if we cannot understand his lack of an ‘acceptable’ emotional response (a stance ratified by Chris Cooper’s bulldozing performance as Davis’ heartbroken father-in-law), we like him enough to feel intrigued, as Karen does.





St. Vincent. It’s a gentler remedy to the concurrent development of Davis, whose annoyances with the creaking of cubicle doors or the flickering of a lightbulb lead him to start deconstructing household objects (picture an episode of James May: The Reassembler gone wrong). Watts’ role begins as an undemanding ‘unhappy housewife’ placeholder but is enlivened by the gradual introduction of Judah Lewis as Karen’s young son, Chris, in a plot thread that smacks of a more developed mirror of Bill Murray and Jaden Lieberher in lesser Watts vehicle. It’s a gentler remedy to the concurrent development of Davis, whose annoyances with the creaking of cubicle doors or the flickering of a lightbulb lead him to start deconstructing household objects (picture an episode ofgone wrong).



