A Man and His Puppet

"The Beaver"

Are you feeling blue?  Do you feel your life has no more meaning?  Have you given up all hope?  This is how Walter Black (Mel Gibson) feels for a majority of Jodie Foster's The Beaver.  Depression is a sickness that affects millions of people year after year.  The remedy for this sickness isn't as simple as saying, "just snap out of it" or suggesting to pop some pills.  No, depression is a feeling that consumes your life and hits you at the pit of your soul.  It also affects everyone that is close to you. 

After inheriting his father's toy company along with a series of other events in his life, the man that is Walter Black seems to gradually deteriorate and he has no intentions of putting his life back together.  Walter's solution: sleep a lot.  This everlasting gloom takes a toll on Walter's wife Meredith (Jodie Foster) and their two sons Porter (Anton Yelchin) and Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) over the course of several years.  Meredith eventually divorces him.

Gibson has been the subject of ridicule due to his questionable and crazy personal life over the past seven years.  In fact up until recently he hadn't appeared in a feature film for the past eight years.  Is he now trying to make a comeback?  Perhaps The Beaver was the right choice for him at this time in his life.  Gibson is perceived as being a crazy person and coincidentally so is Walter after he finds a beaver hand puppet in a dumpster.  This beaver becomes a part of him.  By having Walter wear the beaver, the puppet acts as an extension of his personality.  The beaver takes on all the good characteristics Walter once had.  From that point on Walter is gone and there is only the beaver.  

Meredith and the kids are unsure of how to react to the newest member of their family.  Porter is most disturbed by his father's recent behavior.  This comes at a time in Porter's life where he is finding out who he is, like most high school seniors.  One thing Porter doesn't want to turn into though is his father.  He is able though to have a relationship with star cheerleader and valedictorian Norah (Jennifer Lawrence) who has her own set of emotional problems.  

Meredith struggles to come to terms with her husband’s current state of mind and yearns for the way he used to be.  The relationship Foster and Gibson have is realistic and believable.  There are moments throughout the film where we do care about each of their characters and understand the struggles each of them are going through.  This is something that the screenplay does quite well.

Another reason the characters seem so believable to us is because of Ms. Foster's direction.  She is an actor first and a director second.  She gets fantastic performances from all actors.  This is by far the best performance Gibson has given in recent memory.  Everyone seems so natural and unrehearsed giving us a realistic portrait of a broken family coping with a very heavy family matter.  

It's too bad the screenplay doesn't give us a proper introduction to what the family was like before Walter's depression.  Clocking in at a brisk 90 minutes The Beaver could have used a decent first act by actually showing us the events of Walter's steady decline that ultimately led to his depression.  Instead we're already in a free fall with him just before he hits rock bottom.  We also get bogged down in the side story of Norah not dealing with the loss of her older brother.  It feels like the screenplay was originally only 60 pages long but then the writer had to throw in Norah's story to pad the film out to feature length.  The film loses its focus in these scenes and pretends to connect the dots into having it relate to the other themes and issues that are being dealt with on screen.

The Beaver touches upon a subject matter that no one likes to talk about.  And for the most part it does a passable job of getting a message across about what living with depression is really like.  It does get rather extreme and ridiculous by the third act and the resolution of conflict seems all too sudden for the characters to arrive at.  Maybe those extra thirty minutes should have been devoted to some more character development instead of giving us a “b” story that felt like a tacked on distraction. Nonetheless, the backbone of the film is Gibson's strong performance as a man struggling to get his life back on track and fix his broken brain.  Maybe we'll see a talking puppet in Gibson’s future too.