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The Beaver BY TIM GRIERSON
The Beaver is a strange creature. Mixing marital melodrama, social satire, dark comedy, a coming- of-age tale and a father-and-son story, director and co-star Jodie Foster’s film is emotionally bold, will- ing to follow the lead of its main character (played with real passion by Mel Gibson), who is very slowly having a mental breakdown. But despite its ambitious tonal sweep,The Beaver ends up feeling like pieces of several different films, making it a movie which is more interesting than it is great. It opened on limited release in the US on May 6
with a lacklustre weekend of $107,577, though Summit denied it was hurt by the controversy sur- rounding its star. With Gibson’s name more asso- ciated of late with tabloid scandals than with movie-making, curiosity may be piqued to see him playing a character on the edge, which is dangerously close to his public persona at this point. But with its dark subject matter and bizarre plot about a man who uses a beaver hand-puppet to interact with the world,The Beaver is resolutely an indie offering, thereby limiting its potential box office. Suffering from depression and watching his
marriage fall apart, Walter (Gibson) seems to have hit rock bottom when one night he finds a beaver hand-puppet in a dumpster. After an accident in which he is hit on the head by a television, he wakes up and begins to believe the puppet is a
n14Screen International at the Cannes Film FestivalMay 11, 2011
OUT OF COMPETITION
US. 2010. 91mins Director Jodie Foster Production companies Participant Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi, Anonymous Content Domestic distribution Summit Entertainment,
www.summit-ent.com International sales Summit International Producers Steve Golin, Keith Redmon, Ann Ruark Executive producers Jeff Skoll, Mohammed Mubarak Al Mazrouei, Paul Green, Jonathan King Screenplay Kyle Killen Cinematography Hagen Bogdanski Production designer Mark Friedberg Editor Lynzee Klingman Music Marcelo Zarvos Website
www.thebeaver-
movie.com Main cast Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Cherry Jones, Riley Thomas Stewart
separate personality, whom he gives a British accent and which he keeps attached to his hand at all times. He tells his disbelieving wife Meredith (Foster) and resentful older son Porter (Yelchin), only speaking to them through the voice of the beaver, who Walter believes will help him turn his life around. Foster’s third film as a director (after Little Man
Tate and Home For The Holidays) flaunts a style which mixes dark humour and seriousness. Anchored by Gibson’s fully committed perform- ance as a man who absolutely believes the puppet
is real, The Beaver is a tightrope act as Foster tries to ground Walter’s behaviour in reality while at the same time cueing the audience to be shocked and amused by the ludicrous situation he is putting his family through. But while Gibson’s hangdog vulnerability and
gradual mental collapse are performed with pre- cision, the rest of the film is not nearly as tightly focused or consistently affecting. Even though Anton Yelchin is superb as Walter’s son who fears he possesses the same self-destructive, depressive characteristics as his father, too much of Kyle Kil- len’s screenplay studies Porter’s burgeoning rela- tionship with his high school’s valedictorian cheerleader (played byWinter’s Bone’s Jennifer Lawrence), which feels like a pale mirror of the movie’s larger themes about trying to find your voice. Also distracting is a comedic through-line in
which Walter’s odd beaver friend inspires an idea which saves his floundering toy company. This, in turn, makes Walter a celebrity because of his rela- tionship with the puppet, but the film-makers do not invest enough time on these ideas to give them much comedic or satiric value. When The Beaver settles on the damaged rela-
tionship between Walter and Meredith and the beaver’s attempt to repair it, Gibson and Foster demonstrate a real rapport which suggests the ups and downs of 20 years of marriage. Otherwise, Foster the director has not given Foster the actress much of a role, serving up a drab wife/mother character who is mostly reduced to reacting to Walter’s growing instability.
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