Mad Mel, beyond Blunderdome. Where’d it all go wrong, eh? From charming A-list movie star and multi-award winning director of challenging historical epics to anti-Semitic alcoholic sexist who allegedly beats up his girlfriend.
Perhaps that’s why his performance in The Beaver, a dramedy about a man’s struggles with marionettes and melancholia, directed by long time friend Jodie Foster, is all the more poignant. Opening with a sweeping prelude through the life of Walter Black, a depressed toy company CEO having tried every method from drumming to medication to self-flagellation to ease his emotional burdens, we see Mel Gibson, a man with all the weight of the world on his shoulders, floating silently in a swimming pool, arms outstretched in Christ-like anguish. A cockney voice, later revealed to be the Beaver himself, tells us of his troubles, how he doesn’t want to be like this, how his family can no longer cope, how he’s become a joke professionally, how alcohol offers his only respite. It’s hard to draw the lines between fact and fiction. Well, at least until Walter starts communicating solely through the medium of a plush puppet on his left arm.
Gibson’s is a brilliant performance, making what could have been a cloying stab at pantomime sentimentality into a cleverly believable and distinctly sad role. As Walter’s life begins to improve, thanks to the newfound confidence he gains from his puppet pal, you cannot help but warm to him, a family man who’s out of his depth but who may yet find his feet. Everything gets better, from his working life to his marriage, and sex life to boot, in the most bizarre ménage à trois ever committed to cinema… well… mainstream cinema, anyway. Kyle Killen’s script, however, never chooses to play it safe, and amid all the laughs and giggles there is a foreboding sense of dread that Walter’s mental build-up is waiting to come tumbling down in a hysterical outburst of strained emotions. |
| He couldn't quite figure out where his hand went in the child version |
In the meantime, the film is rather let down by a join-the-dots subplot involving Walter’s son Porter (Anton Yelchin), a brilliant writer who helps his classmates with long-term strategy plagiarism, and whose latest client is the class valedictorian, a gorgeous and genius cheerleader (Jennifer Lawrence), who needs help with her speech. This thread, a neat if easily predictable yarn involving two of Hollywood’s rising stars, is not bad in itself, but fits rather awkwardly with the rest of the film. Yelchin, looking far too old to still be in school, comes across as selfish and inconsistent (he loves it when his date turns out to be a weirdo, yet never gives his father’s eccentrics the time of day), and was it really necessary to ask the audience to believe in a genius who can’t write a speech as well as a subconscious-spouting teddy bear in the one film?
Sadly for Foster, her fine direction loses its way in the final third, when that threatening dam of welled emotions finally breaks. In comparison to 2007’s somewhat similarly themed Lars and the Real Girl, The Beaver flips completely from the wry warm-hearted tale of man with mental problems to an intense psychological drama. When it does come, playing out like some grotesque parody of spousal abuse, it marks a shift from black comedy to something much harsher and harder to watch, and the film never really recovers from its broad tonal shift.
Shame really, because it really is a brilliant performance.
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