The Beaver | Little White Lies

The Beaver

16 Jun 2011 / Released: 17 Jun 2011

Older man with grey hair holding a brown teddy bear, looking sombrely at the camera.
Older man with grey hair holding a brown teddy bear, looking sombrely at the camera.
3

Anticipation.

Mel Gibson with a glove puppet? Could be a car crash.

3

Enjoyment.

Well acted and intended but too unsure of itself – and bizarre – to fully succeed.

2

In Retrospect.

It’s commendable to capture depression on film, but a talking rodent and a fallen star aren’t the way to do so.

At its best The Beaver is deft­ly hand­ed and gen­uine­ly mov­ing but too often it’s jar­ring and disjointed.

It’s not a prob­lem most sum­mer releas­es have. The box office receipts of Green Lantern, Death­ly Hal­lows: Part II or Super 8 will be decid­ed by the qual­i­ty of their sto­ry and spe­cial effects, not by the unpalat­able behav­iour of their stars. But The Beaver faces a far dif­fer­ent chal­lenge in putting bums on seats, with Mel Gibson’s star now at its low­est ebb.

He plays Wal­ter Black, the deeply depressed toy com­pa­ny CEO who botch­es a sui­cide attempt and wakes up hun­gover, morose and with a beaver glove pup­pet instruct­ing him – in an accent that mesh­es Ray Win­stone and Bryan Brown – to pull him­self togeth­er. The ini­tial scep­ti­cism of Walter’s wife Mered­ith (Jodie Fos­ter) fades when she sees her hus­band begin to emerge through the puppet’s chirpy bark and soon the rodent seems the key to redemption.

No mat­ter the qual­i­ty of Gibson’s per­for­mance there­in, the film’s dis­sec­tion of a frac­tured soul can only rein­force audi­ence reser­va­tions about a screen icon now bet­ter known for obscene and vio­lent tele­phone calls than man­ic action movie roles and Oscar-win­ning epics. Foster’s direc­tion is enjoy­ably lan­guid and Anton Yelchin and Jen­nifer Lawrence put in fine sup­port­ing work for a so-so sub­plot, but Gibson’s per­son­al prob­lems are so well doc­u­ment­ed that they over­shad­ow every aspect of this dark­ly com­ic look at a breakdown.

The spec­tre of Gibson’s off-screen woes isn’t the only issue. Kyle Killen’s script delves into the same fish-out-of-water com­e­dy as Elf with some suc­cess, and Gibson’s not lost his com­ic tim­ing. But these humor­ous beats begin to feel inap­pro­pri­ate giv­en the seri­ous­ness of the sub­ject mat­ter. There’s also some­thing entire­ly famil­iar about Killen’s screen­play – which topped the Black List run­down of the best unpro­duced scripts in Hol­ly­wood in 2008 – and Foster’s style.

With a plinky-plonky Thomas New­man-esque score, a mid­dle-aged pro­tag­o­nist seem­ing­ly los­ing his mind and an inter­wo­ven sto­ry of trou­bled and artis­tic teen char­ac­ters, The Beaver fre­quent­ly feels like Amer­i­can Beau­ty with a glove pup­pet thrown in.

Inter­mit­tent­ly, it’s an involv­ing and affect­ing film. Walter’s depres­sion – vocalised through the beaver – is rep­re­sent­ed in raw, unspar­ing terms and the tough truth about Gib­son is that, for all the nas­ti­ness of his self-inflict­ed career nose­dive, he remains a com­pelling and watch­able actor. It’s also a sad­der film that its out­landish premise sug­gests and Yelchin again impress­es with his sen­si­tiv­i­ty, even if his char­ac­ter, a teen afraid of inher­it­ing the sins of the father, feels formulaic.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Killen’s script too often plays the sce­nario for laughs when it should ham­mer home the effects of Walter’s dis­in­te­gra­tion on his fam­i­ly. The gauche remarks of the beaver and – at least this how it felt in the press screen­ing – a pre­vail­ing scep­ti­cism of men­tal ill­ness, means the film rais­es more laughs than you’d expect – and more than are appro­pri­ate – for a film about depression.

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