The Beaver

Some stories are flawed on a fundamental level. No matter how well told or performed they are, there are certain things it becomes tough to get past. “The Beaver,” a lovingly directed film by Jodie Foster, falls into this trap. It’s not bad or uninteresting, just problematic.

Walter Black (Mel Gibson) is a hopelessly depressed man. He has no ambition and spends much of his day sleeping. As the CEO of a failing toy company and the distant father of his lonely little boy Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) and his self-hating teenager Porter (Anton Yelchin), he has no one to look to but his wife Meredith (Foster). But she has given up on him after years of trying to help him come out of his slump and kicks him out of the house.

He drunkenly tries to kill himself, only to be startled by an ugly old hand puppet of a beaver. Walter talks through it with a Scottish accent and assumes this new persona. He convinces his wife it is a therapy procedure and finds his confidence at home and at work through it.

And that’s the key distinction to make about “The Beaver.” The film is not really about schizophrenia or depression but about living through someone else. Critics are saying Gibson gives a brilliant dual performance in the film. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. He is somewhat brilliant, but we never see a shred of Walter himself. He is absolutely speechless without the beaver and never breaks character.

He has literally become the beaver and not Walter, really only giving one performance. To re-assume his original identity, he has to destroy his new one. But because we never see Walter in the first place, it becomes a stretch when Walter/the beaver self-destructs in the intense climax.

In this way, Foster’s film is a parable to better yourself by walking in someone else’s shoes but then learning how to step back into your own. The film parallels this with Walter’s son Porter, who will do anything not to grow up to be his father and ghost writes papers for classmates, including a cheerleader and valedictorian played by Jennifer Lawrence (“Winter’s Bone”).

That theme seems manageable and actually suits the film nicely. Gibson is very good and in a way is giving a Meta-performance that reflects his own life. Foster, Yelchin and Lawrence are all well spoken and play interesting, complex characters. And Foster’s directing evokes a solemn greatness in many of her scenes.

But why the beaver? Kyle Killen, the writer and producer of the very short-lived TV series “Lone Star,” wrote the screenplay and may be the most to blame for overlooking the “peculiarity” in Walter Black’s situation.

Killen has composed a strictly serious screenplay and he’s chosen a beaver hand puppet as his vehicle. Yet he could’ve chosen anything. Why not a different animal? Why not a hand puppet of a person or just a sock? Couldn’t there be one that would be a little less ridiculous?

Or better yet, why does Walter need a puppet at all? All he really does is use an accent, and through Gibson’s performance, that alone is enough to convince us of his transformation to another identity. I think the more down to Earth illustration of Killen’s theme is in Porter and his ghost writing. But that story never actually connects with the main one; it only exists to draw a comparison.

But neither story is bad or poorly executed. Critics are claiming that the best way to save this screenplay is to embed in it a little wit, but this material is too serious to be taken so lightly.

No, I do think “The Beaver” is a good film, but the best way to help it would be to just not have the beaver in it.

3 stars