Just for a moment, let’s put aside our memories of Mel Gibson’s haggard mug shots and raging, bigoted meltdowns. Instead, imagine him fresh off a new Lethal Weapon movie, or even a bloody religious epic that triumphed at the box office. His new movie, The Beaver, about a man in the midst of a psychotic break, would seem something of a hard sell — a divergence from the Gibson brand. Under the direction of his old friend and loyal supporter Jodie Foster, Gibson plays Walter Black, a man so crippled by mental illness that he believes a ratty, bucktoothed beaver hand puppet is both alive and in charge of his destiny. Neither slap-happy comedy nor aggressive action fare, The Beaver is a somber, sad domestic drama featuring an alcoholic in acute crisis.
Sound familiar, almost like a documentary? It’s hard to separate Gibson’s true-life story from what’s happening onscreen. In 10 years, when the actor’s ugly domestic disputes with ex-lover Oksana Grigorieva will have faded from our minds, The Beaver may just seem profoundly odd. But the way its themes dovetail with Gibson’s disgrace make it — peculiarly enough — the right film for him to have made in this very wrong moment.
Plucked from a Dumpster, the Beaver bullies depressed, uncommunicative Walter out of suicide and gives him the will to live and a Cockney accent. Puppet on hand, Walter returns to his wife Meredith , who’d tossed him out the day before. He pretends he’s participating in a radical new treatment program and begins to rebuild his life. The narrative sounds like a zany pitch from a parody of Hollywood filmmaking .
But there’s a dignity in Kyle Killen’s screenplay, a quiet conviction that steadily woos us, just as Walter wins back the affections of his neglected younger son Henry and even convinces Meredith to let him back into her bed. Walter is the CEO of a toy company he’s never been particularly interested in, so his employees are dumbstruck when he shows up in a natty suit — furry puppet held aloft — ready to shake up the business. The Beaver inspires a Tickle-Me-Elmo-size success with a new woodcutting kit for kids, catapulting Walter onto magazine covers and TV programs, where the Beaver continues to speak for him. It doesn’t matter that the man is a freak show as long as he’s making money hand over fist — a meta-irony that Foster plays for broad laughs in a montage is predictable — she too has a secret pain — we are grateful for all the time we spend with the compelling Porter. His struggle to understand and accept his father’s limitations echoes our own: he gives us a reason not to write Walter off as a hopeless loon. Yelchin is intensely present in the role, in contrast with Foster, whose portrayal of Meredith has the sense of an afterthought — as if she were too busy, under her director’s hat, worrying about other people’s performances to put much thought into her own.
