THE BEAVER – The Review

Whether THE BEAVER is about an unstable personality who talks through a beaver puppet or an obnoxious beaver puppet with a Mel Gibson sticking out of its butt, it’s a ludicrous mess; a misguided, wrongheaded movie that’s just mostly bad, mostly wrong and mostly dull. I have to say it’s not the scenes of Gibson talking through his fuzzy surrogate self that are the worst parts of the film. Gibson’s actually quite good and shows a spark of something worthwhile that could have been made from this material. The problem with THE BEAVER is pretty much everything else; a poorly-handled premise, first-timer Kyle Killen’s mawkish hot-potato script, and Jodie Foster’s earnest but bland direction. Gibson stars as Walter Black, a profoundly depressed CEO of a faltering toy company who attempts to exorcise his inner demons by creating an Aussie-accented alter ego for himself in the form of a feculent beaver hand puppet that he pulls out of a dumpster one night while drunk. This does little to improve his dysfunctional family life, at least in the eyes of his exasperated wife (a mopey Jodie Foster) or his eldest son Porter (Anton Yelchin) who hates him so much he’s taken the time to note all the negative similarities the two share on post-its so he can grow up that much less like him. Walter soon turns his business around with the hit concept of a beaver-themed child’s toolbox (yeah, that’ll thrill kids!), but his mental instability continues to spiral out of control leading, unconvincingly, to self-mutilation and redemption.

Soppy melodrama and excruciating piety cling to THE BEAVER like fleas on a dog with the divine parallels of self-sacrifice taken to extremes of righteous absurdity (Walter first appears floating in a pool, his arms outstretched Christ-like).  It takes an excruciating 90 more minutes or so for the payoff – a painful hour and a half of melodramatic moments piled upon melodramatic moments. The ending gets more than a bit ridiculous with Walter physically battling his rancid beaver puppet in a jaw-dropping duel to the death (unintentionally) lifted from EVIL DEAD 2 complete with circular saw. I don’t want to spoil the ending but let’s just say when the dust settled, I kept waiting for Walter to cackle “Who’s laughing now?!”

Mel Gibson’s well-publicized real-life meltdowns are impossible to ignore. Depression and self-hatred are clearly things the actor understands from the inside out and he makes that baggage he brings to the role work to his advantage. His fine performance gives the character of Walter a sulky, almost lackadaisical nature. Instead of making us sympathetic because of his past and his even more glum future, the performance is just plain sad. There is no explanation for the cause of the circumstances that lead Walter to this behavior at the start of the movie or is there an allusion to something in his past that may have caused him to snap. Worse, when Walter’s friends and colleagues first hear him suddenly start talking through his puppet, they don’t seem to think much of it or be particularly concerned, making the film’s entire premise ring false. Killen’s screenplay was originally conceived as a broad comedy to star Steve Carrell but I’m not sure if that change of tone would have helped. Though it plays at times like satire, Foster’s direction is so conventional and flavorless that ideas such as Walter’s ‘beaver tool box’ becoming a media sensation don’t make any sense. Despite an excellent performance from one of Hollywood’s most interesting stars, THE BEAVER is a half-baked misfire and not recommended.

Overall Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars