Dir. Jodie Foster, USA, 2011, 91 mins
Cast: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence,
Review by Carol Allen
Despite having Gibson in the central role and a good supporting cast including the director herself as his wife, the “star” of this movie is the grossly unattractive glove puppet that gives the film its name.
Walter and Meredith are an all American couple with two sons – somewhat dysfunctional and difficult teenager Porter (Yelchin) and cute little moppet Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart). Their marriage is in tatters as a result of Walter’s chronic depression. After Meredith forces him to leave home, unable to stand the situation any longer, Walter takes up residence in a hotel room and after finding the puppet in a rubbish bin, he makes an incompetent and bleakly comic attempt at suicide by first hanging himself from a shower rail, which collapses, and then by leaping from the balcony, with his necktie still attached to the rail. It’s at this point that the beaver puppet leaps into life or rather speech, thereafter spending most of the rest of the film firmly fixed to Walter’s right hand, as Walter, like a bad ventriloquist moving his lips, gives vent to a taunting alter ego, who appears to represent a hot line to his subconscious, giving him a way to express the feelings he can’t voice as himself because of the depression.
The gravelly voice Gibson adopts for the puppet is a strange but effective mixture of Cockney combined with Australian, which has been variously described as Bob Hoskins or Ray Winstone with an antipodean accent. As an expression of Walter’s subconscious Beaver is a repellent little being, who takes over his master’s life, ultimately in a truly horrible and violent way.
Although an apparently serious attempt to deal with the effects of depression, the film is laced with a certain dark humour, as in the suicide attempt above, a scene where Meredith has to endure being made love to by a husband who is speaking to her via a puppet and another, where Walter takes part in a television chat show talking all the time as Beaver. Gibson certainly gives an effectively tortured performance in his dual role and Foster carries out her tasks as co-star and director efficiently. The conflict between Walter (or rather Beaver) and his son smacks a bit of cliché however, though there is some originality in Yelchin’s role, in that there is a suggestion that Porter, who bolsters his pocket money by writing other students’ essays for them for cash, could be heading down a similar road to his father. While the very talented Jennifer Lawrence is somewhat wasted in the role of the girl Porter has his eye on.
After setting up the original situation convincingly enough however, the writer, Kyle Killen, seems unsure about how to develop the story and when he does get it going again, it doesn’t totally ring true. This is by no means a bad film, but ultimately it fails to deliver the emotional power and conviction to which the story appears to be aspiring.
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