“I’m sick.”
“Yeh, but the question is: do you wanna get better?”

From Jerry Maguire’s breakdown-turned-success through the double whammy of American Beauty and Fight Club in 1999 – both of which made almost irresistible the notion of self-destruction as a way to truly live – to the wonderful scene in The Hours where Julianne Moore’s character explains away the seemingly inhuman decision to desert her family with the line, “It was death. I chose life,” and the most recent cut-throat, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook,” of The Social Network, something of an attitude has been rising in the most daring of 90s/00s Hollywood output which I’ll admit I was quite taken with at first as a young 20-something but am not too stupid to have been slightly wary of for quite a long time.

There’s a clue in the opening titles of The Beaver that hints slightly at where it will ultimately side on the profoundly pertinent ideas it sets out through the course of its overwhelmingly unique story. The letters of the production companies and the title (I don’t think any of the cast or crew’s names are shown in these opening credits) fade in on the screen and then fade out, leaving one or two letters behind that appear in the subsequent title. I mightn’t have noticed and mightn’t even be writing about it here were it not repeated during the end credits where its connection to the overarching message here really leapt at me.

I admit however with great pleasure, midway through The Beaver, I was blissfully unaware of where it was headed; of what, indeed, it was “really” trying to say – because it says everything that it says (and it says a lot) so overpoweringly well. I have heard about this movie it seems for years initially as a screenplay that everyone in Hollywood thought was brilliant but that nobody in Hollywood would ever make. With Jodie Foster’s involvement, my interest was truly hooked, especially with her not only starring but directing. On the strength of Home for the Holidays alone she became one of my favourite film makers and I’ve been desperate for her to return behind the camera ever since. I saw one of the more “serious” clips from the movie recently when Foster was on a chat show, and that was when I realised I didn’t just want to see this movie, I had to. Let me just say, I still didn’t know how badly I needed it.

You’ll know the story from the trailer – Mel Gibson plays (brilliantly) Walter, a man at the end of his rope (“His depression is an ink that stains all who touch him. A black hole that swallows all who get near,”) who is “rescued” by a personality he creates in the form of a beaver hand puppet (“You want things to change – really change… forget about home improvement… you have to blow up the whole goddamned building.”).

Even if you sense the darkness inherent in this set-up, I suspect nothing will prepare you for just how seriously screenwriter Kyle Killen and director Foster take this story. There are a few laughs along the way, but they’re either the plain uncomfortable kind or just fleetingly inevitable touches. No farting aunt Gladys here (see Home for the Holidays). Actually, Killen himself puts it best in a sliver of action in an early draft of his screenplay I read before finishing this review, in a late scene as Walter actually fights his own hand:

“If this plays with any humor at the start it very quickly disappears. This isn’t Liar Liar. Walter is truly self destructive and the damage he does is real.”

This could easily apply to the whole tone of the movie, which Foster (I might say this more than once) handles impeccably.

The Beaver himself (called, simply, The Beaver) is the most difficult character here. He is ultimately that perfect villain to me. I like to talk about two particular villains of the past 10 years when I encounter characters as unsettling as this – Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith and Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions. Both these movies left me with a very strange feeling – that these manifestations of evil kinda made too good of a point. You’ll either know what I mean or not there (I might explain it better in those reviews so click on through and come back, I’ll be waiting). The Beaver is such a character. “Eventually, what seemed strange becomes common. What seemed impossible becomes real,” he explains in voiceover at one stage, as, against all odds, for a short time at least, people really kind of accept The Beaver. He’s very persuasive. But he goes too far.

(Yes, I am talking about a hand puppet who you can clearly see Gibson providing the voice for as if he’s a separate entity – believe me, if this movie touches you like it did me… it’s really hard not to…)

I read an interview with Jodie Foster recently in Total Film which, again, should maybe have tipped me off about just how off the wall this movie was gonna be. In one answer, she talked about the “revolution” that’s going on in cinema with digital distribution in such a way that frankly reminded me of Kevin Smith‘s recent bridge-burning attitude with Red State, “Indie Film 2.0” as he calls it. There’s a sequence here where The Beaver takes over Walter’s toy company and leads it seemingly to massive success by risking everything on a single new product. In a voiceover, he makes the kind of point many such as Smith have been making recently:

“Do we want to continue [doing whatever it takes to survive], or do we break with the past and embrace something new, something different, something better?”

It was at this stage when I realised I truly had no idea where the movie was headed. It’s followed by a heartbreakingly complex scene in which the newly successful Walter is interviewed on The Today Show and delivers a monologue with all his family watching. This single scene simultaneously makes the notion that Walter embraces – that notion of those other movies I mentioned at the beginning here… to dump your baggage if it’s what it takes to survive and pursue that higher dream – seem like a perfectly admirable goal (“We start to see who we are as a box that we’re trapped inside, and however we try to escape; resolutions, therapy, drugs, classes, it simply reels us back in. And I believe the only way to truly break out is to get rid of that box all together.”); yet also asks the question this movie really wants to ask… how does this approach to life affect our humanity? How can we abandon those who we’ve invested so much love, time, energy in… our family, our friends… no matter what they’ve done? It’s this, I think, that makes The Beaver so arrestingly timely, in such a hollow, emotionless age as this, despite its interminable development time. It’s what the style of those credits is saying: we are all connected to someone, perhaps more than one someone, somehow; whether we like it or not.

The screenplay is every bit as flawless as its reputation – as I said I’ve read an early draft before polishing this review just to remember some lines (so, incidentally, some of them might be slightly off the way the ended up on screen) and it really is just astonishingly tight – there’s a whole subplot involving Walter’s son that reflects and enforces the main story with its ideas of identity (Walter’s son fears he’s becoming like his father – he makes lists of the similarities – his only skill in life seems to be pretending to be other people, a skill he harnesses at school charging fellow students to write their papers for them), chasing a self-annihilating dream (he gets to know a school cheerleader in order to write her graduation speech for her – only to find the “real her” that she’s buried under the veneer of academic popularity and success), and the ultimate need to put a stop to the bullshit (in an even further level of connection: the way in which his son intends to shake the similarities? Visiting the places where “things really changed” – the assassination spot of Martin Luther King, eg… I damn near lost it when he explained this, so closely does it echo recent thoughts I’ve had of such instances of, as I call it, “Futricide”). It ties together so beautifully I can’t wait to see how well this movie stands up to multiple repeat viewings.

I’ve talked about Jodie Foster’s film making skill but not her acting yet. Do I even need to say how great she is? I think I do. I’m a huge Jodie Foster fan, and I truly thought I’d seen the best of her by now. But I can think of just one moment here where she killed me all over again, in the kitchen when she and Walter’s eldest son comes home and sees The Beaver for the first time. “Have you completely lost your mind? …It takes you years to finally get rid of him and you let him come back the next night with a talking puppet?” he yells at her. Her face is a work of art in response, the depth so indescribable. That’s just one moment of a performance that is as consistently gripping as the whole movie. Jennifer Lawrence and the rest of the cast are just as worthy of praise. (If you haven’t noticed yet… god, did I love this movie…)

I agree for the most part with those whose only criticism of the movie is its disjointedness, or at least see where they’re coming from – in that subplot, sure, if you don’t immediately recognise the connections, but most jarringly perhaps with Walter’s final solution to his problem. But I’d argue I guess that the flaws (if they’re flaws) only serve to make the whole thing even more human. I can honestly say that no other movie this year (nor indeed, in a long time) has made me feel so emotionally alive as The Beaver did for every single one of its admirably short 90 minutes, and that’s why I love movies in the first place.

On a side note I’d like to add a somewhat random note on another way I connected to this movie. I’ve had a Second Life avatar for 5 years, and though it’s hard to explain in brief, I recognised a lot here as pertains to creating a kind of alter-ego that is in some ways the best of oneself but kind of takes on a life of its own… mostly for the better but I’ll admit, even in my case, I’ve had my share of the worst – and I’ve even had to come to that dilemma of coming 100% clean or “blowing up the goddamned building”. As I explained above, this movie goes to a dark place in the end, but I think it’s interesting that anybody watching it will find a different place at which they feel Walter’s self-therapy goes “too far” and I won’t say where that is for me (hopefully you can make a good guess) but I will say it’s something we should all think about. There is a good to Walter’s madness and The Beaver’s idea here… it’s just a question of how far they lose themselves in it. Or, to go back to the movie that inspired the name of this site, and yet another that came to mind while watching this one, as is said in Girl, Interrupted and echoes the quote I opened with:

“Quis hic locus?, quae regio?, quae mundi plaga? What world is this?… What kingdom?… What shores of what world? It’s a very big question you’re faced with, Susanna. The choice of your life. How much will you indulge in your flaws? What are your flaws? Are they flaws?… If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital?… for life?”