Starring: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence
Directed By: Jodie Foster
Written By: Kyle Killen
Produced By: Steve Golin, Keith Redmon and Ann Ruark
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 91 minutes
Website: thebeaver-movie.com
Budget: $21 million
Genre: Drama
Release Date: May 20, 2011
Decades from now, it may come to us to have to explain to our children or grandchildren who a man named “Mel Gibson” was. After some hesitation, we’ll have to explain that for many years, that once-ubiquitous name was one of the world’s most popular actors, and was renowned as an actor AND director in such films as Braveheart and Lethal Weapon.
And then Gibson did some bad things, and he wasn’t as popular as he used to be.
Gibson is absolutely the “elephant in the room” when it comes to The Beaver, and that’s saying a lot in a movie with the questionable title of The Beaver. Delayed after Gibson’s (most recent) public meltdown, The Beaver had until then been a promising high-wattage, high-concept drama directed by revered actress Jodie Foster and starring Gibson alongside promising newcomers like Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) and Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone). Post-freak out, it has been positioned as a test of public perception of the former movie idol.
The expectation is a little unfair: The Beaver was never going to be some kind of blockbuster. It’s intimate, bizarre, uncomfortable, and Gibson – to address that elephant – is easily the best part of the movie. Gibson is Walter Black, the CEO of his later father’s once-prosperous toy company. Despite a long, productive marriage to his engineer wife, Meredith (Foster), and two sons, among them gifted teen Porter (Yelchin), Walter is depressed. Not just depressed, but epically depressed. The drugs, the books, the therapy: nothing works. Facing down the disintegration of his family and his job, Walter finally finds solace in a third party who decides to take control of Walter’s life. That third party is “The Beaver,” a discarded puppet who lands on Walter’s hand and instantly, like a cockney-accented Dr. Phil, becomes the thing Walter needs to get his life back on track.
Foster has proven an adept director in her few attempts behind the camera (Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays), and her deft direction here is no exception. She gets good performances from virtually everyone here, including Yelchin and Lawrence as American Beauty-esque disaffected teens in like with each other. Nobody does better than Gibson, called upon to create two characters, Walter and his puppet alter ego, who must navigate wildly disparate emotions, often within the same scene.
Gibson’s performance is a testament both to his own skills as an actor and Foster’s directorial instincts, but the script falters where they do not. A concept as unwieldy as a family drama about a man who interacts with the world through his animal hand puppet needs everything to work together to sell that concept, and The Beaver simply doesn’t have it. The script, by TV veteran Kyle Killen (“Lone Star”), aims for earnestness in the face of absurdity, but doesn’t overcome its increasingly suspect plot convolutions the further away it gets from the Black family dynamic. The situations Walter and, um, his beaver get into lead one to wonder, more and more as the movie progresses, just how charming Walter is meant to be that virtually no one questions his obviously severe mental break. It culminates in an unexpectedly gruesome finale that encapsulates the movie’s problem: it aims for poignancy, but more often falls on the side of silliness. When the movie works, it’s a reminder of the skill of Foster, Gibson, and the ensemble at large; when it doesn’t, it’s as cartoonish and hollow as it’s googly-eyed title character.
1.5 Stars
