Cannes 2011 review: The Beaver

Can Mel Gibson beaver back into public affection with a puppet in Jodie Foster’s offbeat comedy? Not in this rodent of a film To paraphrase the old saying: career-death is easy but comedy is hard. After Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic outburst and the hateful abuse of his partner brought him the direst disgrace, he sought a funkily ironised way back into the public’s affections. A proposed cameo in Hangover 2 didn’t work out. Now we have his leading role in a pedantically offbeat dramedy-satire of male menopause, written by Kyle Killen and directed by Jodie Foster. Gibson plays the CEO of a failing toy manufacturer who has a breakdown. An attempted suicide winds up with a TV showing an image of Johnny Rotten landing on his head and he wakes up to find he can only communicate via a Beaver hand-puppet he found in a dumpster, speaking in a sort of Aussie-Michael-Caine accent. Crazily, it is liberating and his idea for a Beaver-themed kids’ woodwork kit makes squillions. A number of questions suggest themselves: can Gibson play comedy, of any tone or hue? Can he project an underlying sympathy or charm in his character? Can he make the Aussie-Michael-Caine accent funny or interesting in any way? Can Jodie Foster, as director, help him? The answer in each case is “No”, written in letters big enough to be seen from space. The Beaver might have been interesting if it was boldly, defiantly, autobiographical – with Gibson holding a toy Adolf Hitler puppet. Or if it was about a stressed beaver with a Gibson puppet. Instead we have a standard-issue indie-quirk picture which draws laborious parallels between the mixed-up middle youth grownups and their teenage offspring: Gibson’s adolescent son, who worries about turning out like his appalling dad, makes money writing other people’s class papers in their style – ventriloquising them, in fact – and he too is alienated from his emotions. Kyle Killen’s script is pretty similar in feel to Alan Ball’s screenplay for American Beauty and its themes of midlife crisis and absurdity have a little of movies such as Being There and Network . And of course the creepy hand-puppet gaining, as it were, the upper hand, must inevitably remind the audience of Michael Redgrave in Cavalcanti’s Dead of Night . In each case, the situation’s power surely consists in the leading character having some compelling vulnerability, or some genuine hurt or need, which endows the resulting dysfunction with dramatic meaning and force. And Gibson’s character, tellingly, hasn’t really done anything bad, apart from generally suffer from grouchy middle-aged depression. The person who really should be depressed is his wife (played by Foster herself) who has the quirky job of roller-coaster designer, but is landed with a blandly written role. The Beaver might not have been bad if it was acted with some subtlety and realism and something approaching a sense of humour. Well, Gibson will have to get his teeth into something else. Rating: 1/5 Cannes 2011 Cannes film festival Mel Gibson Comedy Drama Peter Bradshaw guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 17, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.