The Beaver - Review

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Reza
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'The Beaver' review: Mel Gibson talks to puppet

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic

Friday, May 6, 2011


The Beaver

POLITE APPLAUSE

Drama. Starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster. Directed by Jodie
Foster. (PG-13. 91 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

Thinking Mel Gibson is off his rocker is in no way an impediment to
seeing him in "The Beaver," in which he plays a man who is off his
rocker. Given everything Gibson has done and said in the past year,
this might be the only sort of role in which audiences would be
willing to accept him. The surprise is the lovely job he does with
it. He gives a performance of such pain and insight that he makes the
case for himself as an actor again, not a public spectacle.

Indeed, this is the best acting he has ever done, and it's difficult
to imagine how another actor more levelheaded and even-tempered -
which is to say, anybody else - could have brought such reserves of
sorrow and disappointment into play. When Gibson stumbles around a
room, all but suffocated by depression and looking for something with
which to hang himself, he does not seem like a man walking on the
moon. He is not visiting a foreign territory.

Gibson has spent his career playing heroes, but his channel into
self-hatred is direct. He plays suicidal depression without cuteness,
distance or any plea for sympathy, with nothing like the usual hint
that a great spirit might be leaving us. He plays it with only
unfathomable disappointment and exhaustion, so that, under the
circumstances, suicide almost looks reasonable. Is Gibson showing us
the character or himself or some combination of the two? You decide.
But whoever that is onscreen, it's the saddest man in the world.

The title derives from the means by which our hero, a children's toy
company president named Walter (Gibson), climbs out of his
depression. Walter puts on an old beaver hand puppet and hears it
speaking to him in a cockney accent, bucking him up with tough love.
From that point on, the puppet never leaves him, and he speaks only
through the puppet. The puppet is like a drug, solving half his
problems and causing even deeper ones.

Jodie Foster, who plays Walter's wife, directs the film with her
usual grasp of emotional dynamics. She knows Gibson well and brings
out the best in him, but she also invests in the scenes involving
Walter's teenage son, who despises his father but mainly fears ending
up like him. Foster's sure hand makes the son's scenes, which
constitute perhaps a third of the movie, almost as compelling as
Gibson's beaver interludes. She casts it well, too - with the son
(Anton Yelchin) and his girlfriend (Jennifer Lawrence) as a pair of
inwardly troubled kids discovering a connection.

Though the notion of a man's speaking through a beaver puppet gives
the movie its necessary dose of eccentricity, "The Beaver" is nothing
but serious, a pained, astute and fairly grim portrayal of severe
mental illness. It forces you to feel the sheer hell of having it,
and it shows how the misery and difficulty of it reverberates through
the family and the community. There's also an element of social
commentary in that Walter, because his mental illness is flashy,
finds himself a media star.

As someone observes in the movie, "People love a train wreck when
it's not happening to them." How strange that this movie should seem
to be commenting on Gibson himself, when it was filmed before his
recent public scandals. Further, how strange that the movie should
seem like an apology, recorded in advance - or that we should feel
like accepting the apology, when we weren't the ones who were wronged.

"The Beaver" is a complicated experience that leaves us feeling
implicated in our own interest in train wrecks, particularly the one onscreen.

-- Advisory: Adult situations.
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