Right from the start, let's address the elephant in the room, which just so happens to be a beaver.
"The Beaver," which opened locally Friday, stars Mel Gibson as a troubled, severely depressed middle-age executive. Months after filming the movie, Gibson would embark on a string of rants that made him look like a severely troubled, if not depressed, middle-age actor.
In March, after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor for battery of his ex-girlfriend, Gibson received 36 months of probation and 52 weeks of counseling (in addition to separate mental health counseling).
Was life imitating art?
More importantly, did the actor's personal travail trump his performance (which some critics have applauded) and cause the film to have a less lucrative opening last week than studio execs would have liked? No one will flat-out blame Gibson, but the question has been posed. The film's release date had already been delayed because of controversy surrounding the actor, according to industry publication, The Hollywood Reporter.
Jodie Foster, who directed and stars in the film, has remained supportive of her friend, while still being realistic about the situation.
"Are people, are you as a viewer, able to put aside what you might know publicly about someone's personal life and look at a performance and judge it for what it is? I don't know. I know that is a marketing challenge," said Foster by phone. "Whatever problems he had were after the film was finished. He is a complex person. To give what he gives on-screen, you have to be a complex person."
On-screen, Gibson portrays Walter Black who floats into the opening scene spread eagle on his back in a swimming pool, as if he has already given up on life. And for the most part, he has. We soon see Black's pratfall filled, yet failed, suicide attempt. He then decides the dirty Beaver puppet he dug from a garbage bin is his salvation.
Black cleans Beaver up, gives him a Cockney accent and embarks on a new life with the witty flat-tailed rodent as his spokesperson.
Foster, as Black's long-suffering wife, Meredith, is so desperate to have her husband back and see her youngest son come out of his shell, that she jumps on-board the crazy train and starts addressing the Beaver directly, as do employees at the toy-company Black helms. Add the subplot of Black's teenage son trying his hardest not to become his father, and the whole film could have gone haywire.
Foster acknowledges the challenge of reigning in such a fantastical story.
"It has a very odd tone," she said. "The lightness of the conceit... a man puts a puppet on his hand... becomes very dark and painful. I wanted the examination of the depression that he is coming through, that we are all going through as a culture, to be moving."
Gibson, she said, is an actor capable of communicating both comedy and tragedy at the same time. The two worked together during the 1994 filming of "Maverick" and she immediately thought of him for the role.
"It could have been a different cast and it could have been a broad comedy or it could have been saccharine," Foster said.
In production notes, Gibson said he looked forward to working with Foster again. He became a master at manipulating the puppet and bringing it a true personality. The Beaver, he said, was Black's "middle man" supplying the missing link between Black and the rest of the world.
At some point, you may start to think that if Gibson just had a beaver puppet, maybe he wouldn't have had such a meltdown in real-life. But as Foster notes, it doesn't take a Walter Black scenario to cave under the crushing blows life can deal out.
"You don't have to be chemically depressed to understand that life is heavy and the burden of that is something that is often too much for one person to bear. The good news is, you don't have to be alone," she said. "That is a really worthwhile message in my life."
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