What an odd movie The Beaver is. Not just that title, in which most Americans would hear the echo of porno-slang, but also its very idea — that of a man, suffering some kind of midlife crisis and/or depression, who finds he can communicate only through a glove puppet.
I suppose the idea isn’t that bizarre; sometimes communication has to take a roundabout route, and it’s quite possible to feel that one is speaking in a variety of voices, even mutually incompatible ones — “He do the police in different voices” was the way TS Eliot put it. But the execution of this idea in the form of narrative, and with Mel Gibson playing the depressed man, just makes it all so much more bizarre that it’s barely believable.
Casting Gibson, naturally, is provocative. Here’s a Hollywood star who recently disgraced himself with anti-Semitic and other rants, who was accused of punching the woman for whom this devout Catholic left his wife of several decades, and who has admitted to an alcoholism that causes what amounts to personality switches. There’s a kind of typecasting here, as well as a willingness to draw on the actor’s real-life travails to bolster the credibility of the character. Not that it works.
The bleeding obvious
Jodie Foster directs and takes the role of the wife. The long-suffering wife, that is, as we are given to understand by her anxious looks and severely pursed lips while her husband slouches slowly off to work. The prelude and voice-over tell us how depressed Mr Black is — for that is his name, perhaps somewhat obviously. It’s Walter Black, in fact, like Walter Mitty (who had a very active fantasy life) plus the traditional colour of death and mourning. I don’t suppose that when such a character gets cured or redeemed he can change his name to White.
That early voice-over is pretty much all we are told about the roots of Walter’s depression; there is almost nothing in the film to provide such a necessary backstory or background. He’s the head of a successful toy company (though he’s now ruining the business), and he has a conventionally nice family (though the elder son’s a bit weird), but he’s still very very depressed — that’s it.
So we have to accept that as a fait accompli, with a few bits of Mel looking glum, and then we go directly to his being ejected from his home and trying to kill himself at a hotel. The attempted suicide is rather amusing, and one has to assume it was meant to be; there is indeed some humour in the way this story is told, though the humour of the glove puppet is somewhat creepy, too, and after a while the gurning involved in Gibson’s performance ceases to be even mildly funny and just becomes annoying.
Walter Black is no ventriloquist, and this is not (or not at first) one of those chiller stories about a puppet taking over its alleged master, as in William Goldman’s Magic. No, Walter’s lips move while he speaks in the voice of the beaver puppet, which is something the viewer can accept. What’s harder to take is that not only his lips move but, it seems, his entire face – his eyes can’t help rolling about, hither and thither, and a variety of weird and silly expressions contort Gibson’s face, to a degree that is increasingly risible.
Michael Caine?
The toothy beaver puppet also speaks in a parody of Michael Caine’s stylised cockney, and it was the beaver’s voice we heard in the early voice-over, telling us how depressed Walter was.
Why on Earth should the beaver speak like Michael Caine? There is precisely nothing in the film itself to tell us why this voice, of all voices, should have possessed Walter and thus the beaver.
The only reason I could think of is that Caine starred, about a million years ago (and if I’m remembering correctly), in a trashy horror movie in which his hand got severed and went on a killing spree.
If that gives you some clue as to where The Beaver might go in its storyline, so be it.
The film also echoes, probably unintentionally, such relatively recent horror flicks as Idle Hands, in which a youth’s hand goes crazy, in this case while still attached to him, and tries to kill him.
Such a movie, in fact, may be a more subtle meditation on how parts of ourselves can split off and turn on what feels like the core self. Foster’s film gives no sense of why Walter’s beaver puppet might appear to be his salvation for a while, then go nuts; again, we have to accept, without explanation, what you might call a split beaver.
And still it goes on…
But this is to get ahead of ourselves, and perhaps by then the viewer is used to accepting all sorts of things. We accept that Walter’s depressed because we’re told so; we have a shortish period of being shown just how depressed he is, then he discovers the puppet and his life changes.
The scenes in which the beaver speaks to Walter’s staff, suddenly invigorating his toy company, are hard to believe; those in which the beaver becomes a sort of cult, an overnight toy hit and TV presence, are even harder to believe.
But the film ploughs on. Things go wrong again; we are shown, in the most obvious manner, the toys being sold at a huge discount and rubbish trucks chucking discarded beavers on a dump. The ambiguous ending may be a courageous step, but it doesn’t help make sense of anything that has gone before.
Foster’s lips just get more pursed, and you can’t help feeling that she directed the whole film, as it were, with her lips pursed. In fact, her lips are so pursed throughout that you wonder how she manages to speak at all. Perhaps she needs a glove puppet.