THE BEAVER

title: THE BEAVER
year: 2011
cast: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin
rating: *

The story of a depressed family man, played by Mel Gibson, using a beaver hand puppet to cope with everyday life – allowing it to talk for him with a voice resembling Michael Caine – spends little time setting up what drove him to this strange behavior for it to seem either shocking or humorous to his family, employees, or the audience. All we get is five minutes of the main character looking sullen, drinking, and waking up hungover: then he's using the puppet for no explained, or even creatively unexplained, reason whatsoever. The painfully melodramatic acting from Gibson and director Jodie Foster is nothing compared to an extremely useless, and horrendously pretentious, subplot of their oddball high school son courting a pretty girl who practices the “art” of graffiti. And the puppet itself fails both as a quirky comedic devise or, when Gibson’s psychosis mounts to self-inflicted violence, an effective symbol of mental illness. An incredibly bad film, almost beyond description.