The Beaver

2011

As someone who has lived with mental illness both first- and secondhand, I am always interested in films that tackle the subject. At least half of that interest is fear: people can do so much harm through misunderstanding or mishandling. Thus, it has taken me fifteen years to get around to watching the Jodie Foster-directed film, The Beaver.

The trailers for the movie were hard to read. Was this a comedy that used depression solely as a narrative jumping-off point? Did it deal reverently with its subject matter? Was Walter Black (a shockingly excellent turn by Mel Gibson) being held up to ridicule? What was this movie?

A précis of the plot makes these questions understandable. After years of debilitating major depression, Walter tries to kill himself, only to be stopped by the hand puppet he is wearing: a beaver with a cheeky Cockney accent (still Gibson). He finds that he can express himself through the puppet by creating some distance from his paralyzed center and using “The Beaver” to operate from a place outside of his core self. It works in that The Beaver provides a clean slate—an identity unencumbered with Walter’s history and illness—which frees him up to finally communicate with his family and employees, albeit in a secondhand way.

There are so many possible pitfalls in this concept that, if not approached with delicacy and empathy and commitment, the results could be catastrophic. Thankfully, the screenwriter, actors, and director saw this as an opportunity to explore mental illness and the lengths to which all the characters can go to escape the realities and pain in their lives. It’s done well, which means that it embraces the absurdity of the setup (and of life) in ways that can come off as comic at times and tragic at others. Perhaps the best evidence of the filmmakers’ responsible handling of the story is that it is almost always comic and tragic simultaneously.

Walter’s wife (Foster) is amazingly supportive, knowing when to indulge The Beaver as well as the point at which Walter must free himself of his crutch in order to walk. His young son has no problems with the Dad/Beaver dichotomy, proving that children can often deal with the complications and absurdities of life better than adults. His teenage son, however, is another story. And it is Walter and this son, Porter (an angstily winsome Anton Yelchin), who form the two poles around which the story turns.

Porter is obsessed with noticing the ways in which he is like his father so that he can systematically eliminate them in an effort to escape the depression that runs in the family. This is, of course, simply another way of doing what Walter attempts with The Beaver. He is so focused on who he wants NOT to be that he cannot accept or even recognize who he IS. His budding romance with the class valedictorian (Jennifer Lawrence) allows him to see the same patterns of avoidance and self-construction-through-elimination in her. Obviously, his focus on helping her while not seeing his own need causes a more life-sized version of the conflict that Walter’s Beaver represents.

The script is smart, dark, and complex. It seeks to dive into the everythingness of life, showing the good and bad and funny and sad, and to learn how to accept all those pieces and still move forward. All of the performances are great (I mean, we have three Oscar-winners on deck!), and the knowledge that, five years later, Yelchin would be killed in an accident with his car (although not really a car accident) lent a sharpness to the themes of the film. Truly, he showed so much promise, and I was hit again with the tragedy of his young death. As far as the directing, there are no problems. I do wonder, though, about the art hanging in the various backgrounds in the film, which seemed like odd choices but were often calling attention to themselves. It would take another viewing to sort out what Foster is doing there. Thankfully, however, what she does with the rest of the film is respectful and insightful and responsible.