Is it wrong to feel sorry for Mel Gibson? Some would say he’s beyond sympathy, maybe even beneath contempt. Zach Galifianakis famously refused to work with him on Hangover 2. Racist rants and streams of invective hurled at his ex-girlfriend have made him persona non grata. Yet it’s also true that Mel did his best to keep his dark side private (the ranting took place when he was drunk; the abuse was tape-recorded by the ex-girlfriend); for years he’s walked around with all that rage bottled up inside him. We live in a confessional culture, where Jade Goody performed her own death for the cameras and Kevin Smith wrote a book (partly) about his bowel movements – but it’s fine to offer up repellent details about yourself if that makes you a victim. If it makes you look angry, forget it; especially if you had the good manners not to share your problems with the world in the first place.
The Beaver is tailor-made for Gibson, except that Walter Black (our hero) isn’t angry so much as listless, “a hopelessly depressed individual” first seen floating in a swimming pool with a glazed expression. He’s not dead, but he might as well be; the man he used to be is dead, the loving husband and doting father of two sons (one of whom, Porter, is now a teenager). Then comes redemption in the form of a hand-puppet – “the Beaver” – which Walter uses in the style of a ventriloquist’s dummy, flapping its mouth in synch to a kind of gruff mockney. ‘Wake up, ya worthless sod!” barks the Beaver – and Walter does wake up, literally and metaphorically. Suddenly he’s buzzing with ideas at work, bonding with the kids at home, and back to loving his faithful wife Meredith (Jodie Foster). Only it’s not Walter who motivates the staff, delights his young son and makes love to Meredith. It’s the Beaver.
If you think that sounds like a zany comedy, you’re absolutely right. The film should’ve been a comedy, for two reasons. First, because it’s so obviously set up for comedy. Porter, for instance, doesn’t just bang his head against the wall in frustration at his teenage problems – he’s got a special spot in his bedroom (hidden behind a map) which he uses for wall-banging, the plaster flaked and hollowed by years of contact with his head! This is a film where the Beaver joins Walter and Meredith in bed, for goodness sake, nodding his little rodent head in post-coital pleasure! But the second reason is that casting Mel Gibson and not playing for laughs is to miss a trick; he can do dark comedy, the darker the better. He gives a strong, heartfelt performance as Walter – but it’s missing the patented Mel madness, the manic gleam he brought to another head-case in Conspiracy Theory.
Even worse, Foster (as director) doesn’t just play down the comedy; she plays up the pathos, making the pace molasses-slow and slathering a glum, funereal score over everything. She (or the writer) also tries to make the premise logical, which kills the lunacy. Walter pretends that the Beaver is part of a treatment approved by his doctor, telling people he’s “under the care of a prescription puppet” – which ‘makes sense’, explaining why they play along with his insanity, but any satire of therapy culture is half-baked (we needed more jokes like Walter claiming hand-puppet therapy is “very big in Sweden”) and it might’ve been better in any case if Walter offered no explanation, but his loved ones acquiesced because they were just so glad to have him back. As it is, the doctor scam merely ends up feeding into the usual Hollywood template, Meredith finding out that he lied to her and announcing that she’s leaving him and yada yada yada.
There’s real pain in The Beaver – the pain of feeling “trapped in a box” as Walter puts it, a box weighed down with the weight of the past. Porter has a girlfriend at school who’s emotionally crippled by the death of her brother years before; Porter himself is haunted by the thought that he’s turning into his father, and Walter has become like his own father (who was also depressed and suicidal). The scabrous Beaver stands for wild rebellion, breaking out of all these traps and starting anew – which again brings us back to Mel Gibson, haunted by his own past and his own father (a controversial figure given to anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial). Gibson’s redemption is that he’s an Artist, channelling his rage into films like The Passion of the Christ – in exactly the same way as Walter channels his frustration into his boisterous hand-puppet.
Hidden traumas, fathers and sons, numbness and pain and deep, aching loneliness; being flippant about The Beaver is like being flippant about somebody dying – yet the film is a slog, as if made by a well-meaning social worker who nods sympathetically and calmly explains that everything we see, however weird and embarrassing, is really a Cry For Help. “Eat the pill, read the book, see the bloody expert!” rants Walter, seething with contempt for self-help culture; he probably wouldn’t like this film much, if he were real – and Mel Gibson (who is real, or close enough) also might prefer a more extreme, less lugubrious movie, judging by his own work. Someday he’ll be Mad Mel again, but for now he’s stuck doing penance – and dealing with his Issues – in The Beaver. How can you not feel sorry?
DIRECTED BY Jodie Foster
STARRING Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin
US 2011 91 mins.
