The Beaver (Friday, May 6, 2011) (28)

I first heard about The Beaver, when it won first place on the 2008 Black List, an annual industry round-up of the best unproduced scripts (it's important to note that the script for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is #11 on that list... and was one of the best scripts of 2009). It came up again when Jodie Foster became the director of it and cast Mel Gibson as the lead. Then, after production had wrapped in the summer of 2010, the audio tapes of Mel calling his wife terrible names (and other things) came out and the film's release (scheduled for the fall of 2010) was held indefinitely. So finally it's out in theaters (well, sorta... I think it was on 22 screens across the country).

The Beaver is a terrible movie, having nothing to do with Mel Gibson being an anti-Semitic bigot. It has what is actually one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time that takes shocking, gonzo steps as a way of avoiding banality. It has no structure and the premise, based on a quick read of the psychology Wikipedia entry, is bizarrely naive about what it's getting at. That this movie was ever produced is a testament to how stupid and navel-gazing the movie industry is.

Walter (Gibson) is a massively depressed businessman who also seems to suffer with with mania and schizophrenia. One day, while on a drinking and suicide bender, he finds a stuffed beaver puppet in a dumpster, puts it in his hand and begins to talk to himself in a cockney accent. This externalized superego then gets Walter to go back home, after his wife (Jodie Foster) has kicked him out, and make amends with her and his two sons. His older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), is a high school outcast who writes papers for his classmates for cash. He hates his father and is trying to do anything in his power to not be like him.

At some point, Porter is contacted by the school valedictorian, Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), to write her valedictory address. He agrees and comes back to her with an offensive piece about how sad she is that her brother overdosed on drugs. Oh - and she likes to paint graffiti, but isn't allowed to do that because her mother doesn't want her to. Are you bored yet? Remember how this was a about a guy who talks with a puppet? Right.

It's a real surprise to me how much of this story is not about Walter and the eponymous puppet. Almost half of the film is about Porter, a secondary character, and about half of that story (a quarter of the film) is about Norah, a tertiary character. I think the idea is that the beaver is for Walter what Norah and Porter are for one another, that is some sort of external force that guides their struggles. The problem is that this simple nugget of an idea is so convoluted that it's almost totally lost. For most of the third act, there is no Walter and there is no beaver. This is stupid.

One amazing thing about the script, by Kyle Killen, is that it seems to be about psychology on the surface (it's about a crazy guy and it's pretty clear that the writer has some idea of what an id, and ego and a superego are), but it's not a very deep examination of anything psychological at all. We see that Walter goes to shrinks in the opening montage (and apparently lays in the couch at one), but he then comes up with the beaver "cure" on his own without any medical guidance (as if the treatment of depression was somehow easy and good for a punchline). After not fundamentally improving with the help of the puppet, he hurts himself in a pretty grizzly way, and then is checked into a psych hospital, medicated, treated off-screen and healed (well, it's a happy ending, so the idea is that he's on his way to recovery). The film isn't really critical of psychology, but it deals with it so lightly that it becomes either a joke or a proxy for "all that's wrong in our world". This is stupid too.

Gibson's performance is much more subdued than he is normally. It's certainly showy - he's really playing a blank cypher for a cockney beaver - but it's not as loud and crazy as he is frequently and he doesn't chew up too much of the set. Foster's direction is fine, if unnoticeable, but I give her as much blame for the terrible structure and script as Killen gets. How on earth could she have let this movie be made with this script?

Hollywood loves movies about shrinks - because everyone in Hollywood is in therapy. Hollywood is not filled with smart people, however. This is the perfect storm of those two things. Somehow people read this script, saw it was a gonzo take on psychotherapy/psychiatry and decided that it was a winner. Nobody ever had the depth of interest or knowledge to pick out the interesting nut of an idea and re-write it. This could have been an interesting and hard-hitting film. Instead it's a joke and is terrible.

Stars: 1 of 4