Film review: The Beaver

Undeservedly a flop in the US, this Mel Gibson rehab vehicle from Jodie Foster is based on an intriguing idea but it's played too straight even to become a cult classic

• Mel Gibson as Walter Black. Picture: PA Photo/Icon Film

The Beaver (12A) ***

Directed by: Jodie Foster

Starring: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Jennifer Lawrence, Anton Yelchin

MOVIE star baggage can be a tough thing to shrug off, even when a film relies on it for its success. Had Mel Gibson not thoroughly tarnished his reputation over the past few years with some very public, very well-documented and some very troubling outbursts, his performance in The Beaver as a man publicly cracking up might simply have been viewed as an ageing movie star riffing on a career defined by playing characters pushed to the edge of craziness (Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Hamlet). Instead it's hard not to view it as an extended, life-imitating-art-imitating-life therapy session, with Gibson using a film to simultaneously disassociate himself from and confront his own issues the way his fictional character in The Beaver uses a hand puppet to do the same.

That's too bad, because there are things in The Beaver, Jodie Foster's third film as a director, that mark it out as a brave and interesting film, not the least of which is Gibson's performance. He plays Walter Black, a successful CEO of a toy company whose wealth and loving family haven't stopped him falling into a deep depression. He's barely able to get out of bed, his company is rapidly going down the tubes and his unexplained illness has taken its toll on his family. His engineer wife, Meredith (Foster), avoids him by spending her evenings engaged in all-night conference calls with clients in Tokyo, his youngest son Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) has started exhibiting loner tendencies at primary school, and his teenager Porter (Anton Yelchin) hates him so much he's started listing all the character traits he thinks they share so he can systematically eradicate them one by one.

When Meredith finally kicks him out, he finds himself in a suicidal state in anonymous hotel room where a botched attempt to take his own life – involving a shower rail, a necktie and a heavy-looking TV – results in him waking up to discover that he can function as a human being by communicating through a beaver hand puppet retrieved from the dumpster the previous night. Speaking in a curious London accent that Gibson seems to be channeling from his Edge of Darkness co-star Ray Winstone, the Beaver (as he introduces himself) becomes Walter's mouthpiece, enabling him to function around his family and his employees by unburdening Walter of any crippling connections to his past – a simple notion Walter may subconsciously have absorbed in his drunken stupor from an old episode of Kung Fu that was playing on TV the night of his suicide attempt.

Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, the Beaver functions as Walter's anarchic id; he's a projection of the person he'd most like to be, but for whatever reason, wasn't able to be in the life he was leading. Unlike Fight Club, though, this protagonist is self-aware enough to know what he's doing.

Convincing Meredith that his new appendage is a legitimate form of therapy, Walter, with the Beaver in hand, moves back into the family home, where he's received warmly by Henry, warily by Meredith and frostily by Porter.

Despite the comic potential of the conceit, neither Foster nor Gibson plays it for laughs. Gibson in particular does a good job of bringing the Beaver to life as a kind of malevolent Muppet, something that is insidiously taking control of Walter's body, and he's aided by the nifty way Foster puts together scenes to give us a clear sense of Walter's fracturing personality. As the Beaver becomes a more prominent force in Walter's life, so too does its position in the frame.

Foster also treats the issue of mental illness sensitively and intelligently and for long stretches takes the film to some surprisingly dark and despairing places. But she can't seem to give in to the concept in a way that's fully satisfying. Working from a screenplay by Kyle Killen, it's a conventionally structured piece and too neat for a film with the out-of-the-box potential of its core idea. A subplot involving Walter's successful return to work that sees him splashed across the media is dispensed with far too quickly, especially as the tide begins turn against him again.

Meanwhile, his son Porter's awkward relationship with the smartest girl in school (played by Winter's Bone star Jennifer Lawrence) morphs into a typical teen angst-ridden exploration of the need to be true to yourself and express what you feel. Given the limited commercial prospects of the film (it tanked disastrously at the US box office), The Beaver could have withstood being a lot stranger, and it's hard not to wonder what a more maverick director such as Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry or Charlie Kaufman could have done with the material and the star. The Beaver isn't the train wreck many were predicting it to be, but it's too safe to be the crazy cult film it could have been.