Geekscape Movie Reviews SXSW: The Beaver
I feel sorry for The Beaver. I mean, the movie was already a tough sell. Here you’ve got a story about a suicidal manic depressive whose life has gone to shit who finds a way of coping with his mental illness by creating an alternate personality in the form of a beaver hand puppet. You’ve got this odd mix of a super dark story with an oddball comic premise, yet it’s all directed in a conventional, if somewhat whimsical, style. It’s a tonal mess that was already going to have a hard time finding an audience. But you know what, it had an incredibly buzzed about script and managed to snag the long inactive Mel Gibson as its lead. Perhaps there is light at the end of this tunnel.
Unfortunately a few punched wives and drunken racist rants later, things seem pretty dire.
The Beaver premiered two nights ago here at the South By Southwest film festival after being put on the shelf following the most recent Mel Gibson controversy and the excitement was palpable. Partially because this script has been talked about for years and now we were finally able to see it, but mostly because Mel Gibson is a crazy person and this seemed like an apt movie to demonstrate that.
The thing people forgot, and will hopefully be reminded of now, is that Mel Gibson is also a great actor with incredible screen presence, and The Beaver gives him ample opportunity to showcase his skills. This is truly a wonderful performance and certainly would have been a comeback film for Mel had he not gone off the deep end.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, and writer Kyle Killen to talk about the film. Yelchin was quick to defend his co-star, stating, “It’s just a pity that Mel had to go through all this because I think his performance is so great and I think it would really be a shame if people could not overcome however they feel about his personal life and see his performance for what it really is.” Yelchin went on to say, “An actor’s job is to act, not to live out their personal life for millions of people. It’s just to go to set and do what he did, which is to give a great performance. I really think it’s a pity. Whatever people think about him as a human being, at the end of the day it’s not really any of our business.”
The film makes it particularly hard to forget Mel Gibson, the person, though. There is a striking parallel between the character, Walter, and the actor. Walter is an alcoholic depressive prone to bouts of violence, sometimes directed at his family, and is certainly a bit delusional. I personally found these parallels to be strengths, and believe they add weight to the character. However, they are more than a little distracting.
Another hurdle audiences will have to jump is the fact that there are actually very few moments where Gibson is acting outside of his Beaver character, complete with an accent that is uncannily similar to Ray Winstone.
When asked if it was hard to act against Mel, given this strange method, Yelchin said, “Not really for me, because Porter doesn’t even acknowledge the puppet. He just ignores it. He comes in and sees it, and I think more than anything, to add insult to injury, not only has his father removed himself from his life and is this force that makes him doubt his own sanity, now he’s replaced his own family with a talking beaver. So I think there is some level of hurt that comes with having to deal with that. But he just ignores it, so for me I was just acting with Mel or with Jodie. The Beaver was just a toy to me.”
Director and star Jodie Foster had little to say about Mel, personally, but it’s clear that the emotional crisis of the film is something that attracted her as an artist. “I make personal movies about people in significant spiritual crisis and how they evolve through those crisis to become, hopefully, more whole. So things that are perceived as a handicap become strengths. That seems to be what I do. Loneliness is a big feature of all of my movies. I’m sure it’s my way of communicating my life and who I am,” she said. “The loneliness and themes about solitary characters who are misfits, that don’t fit in, and are trying through this moment of crisis to figure out how they want to live. How do I live? In some ways, when they get through it they realize that they are not alone and there are other people who are misfits too and that’s where they belong. That’s a big theme in all my films. I’m sure it has a lot to do with my tragic childhood.”
As you can probably tell, despite what the trailers may indicate, The Beaver is a drama first and a comedy second. I think it does an admirable job of rising past its gimmicky conceit and being genuinely touching, if a bit cliche in the end. However, this tonal imbalance may turn off some viewers and was a concern from the inception of the story.
“It has a unique tone to it, an odd tone to it, a quirky tone to it. I think it’s been quite a challenge for them to figure out how to tell people what it is. It does have a lightness to it, it does have a quirkiness to it,” says Foster. Writer Kyle Killen added, “What makes it palatable I think is that it has some light and enjoyable moments and it lets you look at this guys very real problem of depression through a lens that, fun is the wrong word, but if I tell you that I have a really gritty painful movie about a guy that is deeply depressed it’s harder to get people interested in that. I think, in a way, the device and the comic layer on top of it lets you get away with putting some very real and hard to watch stuff in there.”
Given the odd tone of the film, it’s a small miracle it was made at all. Killen details the long journey from script to film, “My wife got pregnant and we quickly discovered that she was pregnant with twins and we basically agreed that I had nine months to demonstrate that I could make money by writing or I needed to get a job that would do something more for the two mouths we were about to have to feed. This was a short story. I had written some short stories and someone had contacted me about doing a collection and they told me I just needed a long short story to finish the collection. So I started this as a long short story which then blossomed into a novel. It blossomed into hundreds of pages of insanity. Like Matt Lauer was a major character in the book. The Vice President was a very major character in the book, who was obsessed with her own bowel movements. It was a really out there thing.” He said, “I realized that that could spin on forever and the timeline was ticking down, so I decided I could make it a screenplay because those are like 120 pages and that would be really fast. It wasn’t, but I think the discipline helped cut out a lot of the crazy. To some extent. I turned it in a week before we had the twins and Steve Golin, the producer, bought it a week later. It went from being a desperation thing to demonstrate that I could write to quickly exceeding my wildest expectations. Various people were interested in playing the parts and it was getting read everywhere and then the black list came along. It went from just years of outgoing phone calls and random jobs doing crazy things to suddenly incoming phone calls. I’ve been lucky enough to be dining out on it ever since.”
It’s unfortunate that Killen’s success and the hard work of the filmmakers will likely be affected greatly by one person’s personal meltdown, but that’s one of the dangers of this kind of business. I certainly think you should take a chance on The Beaver. It’s not a perfect film but it is unique, touching at times, and features a dynamic performance from one of our last genuine movie stars.
The screening was a huge success, but as Foster points out, “Well you have to remember that it is a festival audience and people are really nice at festivals. That’s what I love. Especially at indie festivals. They definitely want to embrace and celebrate other people’s first times out and they don’t want to bring people down. It’s so nice. It’s what I love about Sundance as well. It’s not a bunch of monsters out there trying to eat you.”
Sadly, the real world isn’t so kind.
