Review: The Beaver

"You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"

The Beaver
Directed by: Jodie Foster
Starring: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence
Released by: Icon

‘The elephant in the room’ is an uncomfortable fact that everyone tacitly agrees to ignore. Yet every goddamn review of this film (sigh, this one included) has to mention the fact that Mel Gibson portrays a deeply disturbed, unlikeable man, which – get this – he has also revealed himself to be in life.

Gibson’s offscreen behaviour won’t ruin this film. That’s the way of it in Hollywood these days; agents and studios no longer control stars’ public images; and audiences don’t mind their meltdowns.

But the intertextual baggage Gibson brings makes it hard to take him seriously as Walter Black, a man almost catatonic with depression who thrusts himself into another kind of madness. On the verge of suicide, he comes across a beaver puppet that talks to him in a Michael Caine voice. Fatefully, he decides to let the beaver do the talking from now on.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s a strong performance. Gibson exudes a bewildered bone-weariness as Walter, and a steely affability as the beaver. I just couldn’t stop wondering if another actor would have been less distracting.

"And because we're young and angsty, I thought – graffiti!"

While Walter’s domestic and professional lives do get an initial boost from his unconventional self-therapy – particularly, it brings him closer to his younger son Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) – this is no sunny quirkfest. The beaver soon becomes a barrier between Walter and his emotionally exhausted wife Meredith (Foster) and teenage son Porter (Anton Yelchin).

Porter, particularly, is angry at his dad’s illness and disavows all the things he has in common with Walter (he collects these observations on Post-It notes). One that isn’t on the list is that Porter is also a ventriloquist – he sells his classmates essays written in a convincing imitation of their own voices. When school valedictorian Norah (Jennifer Lawrence) asks Porter to write her graduation speech, he becomes determined to exorcise her painful past.

There are interesting ideas here about how vulnerable people might communicate by proxy as a way to avoid having to confront their darker selves. For Walter, the buffer is the beaver; for Porter, it’s Norah. But the film isn’t really sure where to take this subplot, turning it into a naff coming-of-age love story.

I appreciated that The Beaver doesn’t sentimentalise or trivialise mental illness by suggesting a chirpy critter can save a sad dad. Rather, the puppet is an unsettling and divisive figure. The way Foster films it often makes it seem uncannily alive, its little eyes seeming to shrewdly assess a situation. No wonder it unnerves Walter’s colleagues and family.

Depression is like that. It makes people uncomfortable, and the puppet manifests this. It’s not a tool to help Walter ‘get over’ his illness; rather, it dares Walter’s family to admit the way things are. It’s the beaver in the room, if you will.

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