In The Beaver, Mel Gibson plays a man named Walter Black who has hit rock bottom. His wife Meredith (Jodie Foster) has just kicked him out of the house, and his eldest son (Anton Yelchin) is mortified that he and his dad are more similar than different… in all the bad ways. Depression is killing Walter, but after a drunken night of dumpster diving and a botched suicide attempt, Walter shows up back on his family’s doorstep with a beaver puppet firmly entrenched on his arm. Walter’s personality has been shoved aside—The Beaver is now speaking for him. And The Beaver happens to sound eerily like Michael Caine with a jaunty cockney accent.

“They have the biggest challenge in the world, marketing this movie!” laughs The Beaver’s director and co-star Jodie Foster. And here I am, sitting across from my idol, participating in a round table interview with the two-time Oscar-winner. In person, Jodie is as petite as the rumors say, but her genuinely warm personality fills the room, which helps put this admittedly star-struck fangirl journalist at ease. Padding around the suite barefoot, she sits down cross-legged on a cushy chair to chat with us about her film, her career, and, well, javelin throwers (more on that later).

I tell Foster that the film surprised me, as it was much darker than I expected. The first half has a fable-like comic tone, but at around the halfway point the movie takes a dramatic, sad turn, leading the story down a tragic path. In addition to clinical depression, the character of Walter is also suffering from a world-weary melancholy, Foster says. “Sadness, [is a] sort of universal phenomenon as you get older…” Foster states thoughtfully. “You know, your parents age, and your friends die at 25, and your children disappoint you. What do you do with all that grief? What do you do with it and how do you handle it?”

Indeed, I mention to Foster that I’ve told friends that The Beaver is a very different film than I expected from the trailer. “It’s really hard to capture the tone of this film in a trailer… incredibly hard,” Foster says. “The big challenge is getting people in the theater. Because if you’re getting people in the theater, and telling them that it’s a ha-ha comedy, they’re gonna be really disappointed when they leave. That’s not good for your movie. At the same time, if all those people that really want to see dramas don’t even realize it’s a drama, your real audience isn’t coming to see your film!”

The story follows Walter as he slips further and further from his old life, while attempting a last-ditch effort to reach out to his family through a surrogate personality that is the beaver puppet. Initially, his wife brings him back into the home, seeing a glimpse of her husband through the cocky, comic, and dynamic personality coming through The Beaver. But things get much worse before we, as the audience, are given a glimmer of hope that things will get better for Walter. “I tend to make movies about people in a spiritual crisis,” Foster says. “They are not people who go through a spiritual crisis and turn bad and go South and kill everybody at a 7-11. They are people who, by virtue of attacking this crisis head-on, and not running away from it, are able to come out the other side.”

To tackle this role, Mel Gibson, who has had more than his share of very public crises the last couple years, was required to hit comic highs and dramatic lows, playing essentially two distinct characters, Walter and The Beaver. It wasn’t a stretch for Foster, as director, to reach out to her longtime friend Gibson to offer him the part. “…I know both sides of him; I know that he can play the witty side. But you do need someone who can handle the lightness and the wit... who would understand the craft of descending, and could really bring something to the film about struggle… who has that inside of him.” Early reviews show that critics are almost universal in their praise for Mel Gibson’s work in the film. “I’m just so proud of the performance,” Foster adds. “It’s an extraordinary performance by him, and I’m so grateful that he trusted me enough to really give that much of himself to it.”

The Beaver is as much about Walter’s struggle with his depression as it is about his family struggling to deal with his mental illness. While considering actresses to play the grounding role of Meredith, Walter’s long-suffering wife, Foster didn’t have to look far. “I was really looking for somebody to anchor the film dramatically, and to be the eyes and ears of the audience in a way that Walter Black and The Beaver could not be. We know that Walter’s crazy. As a protagonist, he’s unstable. So he can’t really function as the eyes and the ears of the audience. I just had to find an actress who was age-appropriate, who I knew you’d really believe that they’d been together for a really long time, and I just was like,” (Foster sighs and laughs), “Why don’t I just do it.”

Doing double-duty as director and actor for the second time (the first was her directorial debut, Little Man Tate in 1991), Foster admits juggling the two roles is tricky. “It is hard, and it’s crazy… I mean, it really is crazy. Mel and I talk about that a lot, because he directed himself in his first film, and after he finished that, I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’ and he said, ‘I’m never going to do that again!’ Then he went off and did Braveheart!” she laughs. Still, after reading thousands of scripts, there is occasionally a story, like The Beaver, that will keep her up at night. She aggressively pursued producer Steve Golin, selling herself as the right director for the job. Finally, after another director dropped out, she got the movie.

“Half the reason that I’ve made movies as an actor in the last 10, 15 years is really just to work with directors that I admire, and I look over their shoulders and go, ‘Wow. How did they do that? How did they do this? How can I tell the story with him?’ Whether it’s Spike Lee, or Alan Parker, or Martin Scorsese, or David Fincher—I think I learned more from David Fincher than anybody—[or] Neil Jordan.” She adds, “I look at actor-directors now that have the career that I wish that I had… I think of Robert Redford or Clint Eastwood… or Mel. People who had a strong identity, in some ways, as a mainstream, A-list actor, but they haven’t really chosen that path as directors. They’ve chosen a much more auteur style of filmmaking as directors, and, in some ways, weren’t tempted by becoming less of an auteur, because they already had an identity.”

I asked her if, as an actor, there was ever a type of role that she has always wanted to try, but she’s never been asked. “I’m a good bad guy, and I tend to play good guys all the time. But I’m a good bad guy,” she says conspiratorially. Pondering further, she then adds enthusiastically, “I’d like to do a movie—and I’ve felt like this for a long time—where I had to take six months and learn to do something. Learn to be a javelin thrower, or to play guitar, or speak Romanian… Some weird thing that I would learn to master, and it would take me six months to do that, and then I’d start the film. I’ve always wanted to do that, and nobody’s ever asked me!” she laughs.

For now, though, javelin training and Romanian language lessons will have to wait. What is the message that Foster hopes audiences will take away from The Beaver? “If there was a message that I wish I had when I was, you know, 18, 19… 25… 32… throughout all of my spiritual crises—my [mental] screensaver is to be solitary, and to not connect. The only way for me to connect, really, is to make movies about it. It’s too difficult for me to share. That’s what art is: It’s connection, and recognizing that you don’t have to be alone. It seems like an incredibly simple message, but I think you really examine it through the film. Here’s a man who wakes up, and the first thing he says to the puppet is, ‘Leave me alone.’ And the puppet says, ‘That’s not what you want. You want just the opposite! You need a friend!’ That’s what he was looking for all along. To be intimately known. To be known.”

[Read Moviepie's review of The Beaver.]

Mel Gibson | Jodie Foster | Interviews

OK, we see this is a serious family drama, but A) the title is already bringing snorts from the public, and B) will people pay to see poor down and out Mel Gibson wallowing before he becomes a better man? After talking to a beaver puppet, that is?

SYNOPISIS: Two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster directs and co-stars with two-time Academy Award winner Mel Gibson in The Beaver – an emotional story about a man on a journey to re-discover his family and re-start his life.

Plagued by his own demons, Walter Black was once a successful toy executive and family man who now suffers from depression. No matter what he tries, Walter can't seem to get himself back on track... until a beaver hand puppet enters his life.

OFFICIAL SITE: http://www.thebeaver-movie.com/

Trailers | Mel Gibson

I always remember professing my love for Roald Dahl during a conversation about children’s literature, only to have a friend shoot me down with a pointed, “He was an anti-Semite, you know.” Well, no, actually I had no idea. After reading almost all of his work for children and quite a few of his short stories for adults, I had no clue that this man had any problem with the Jews. If it was there in his work, it was not obvious to an unsuspecting reader (i.e. me) and therefore had no power to influence my beliefs. To this day I don’t even know if this revelation was true. I never pursued it, never googled it, never really wavered in my affection for stories about Big Friendly Giants and chocolate factories, but I’m left with the stinging words of that friend, words that implied I should know better than to align myself with the work of someone whose personal beliefs I did not share.

Which brings me to Mel Gibson. I discovered Mel when I was twelve years old and promptly fell head over heels in love. I had never seen a more beautiful, vulnerable, or badass man in my life, and with those stunning blue eyes, he even blew my third grade crush on Sylvester Stallone out of the water. For months he was all I could think about, and then a girl at school dropped a bombshell, “He’s got six kids and is super religious.” After I told her to stop lying to me, I began to wonder, “What if he’s nothing like I imagined?”

As time went on and I began to see more of Mel, I quickly learned that he was nothing like I imagined, and that the same things that made him hot as Martin Riggs might not be quite so attractive in real life...things like alcohol and cigarettes and a temper. As seventh graders my neighbor and I wrote stories about our future husbands, and the ones about Mel weren’t always pretty. Even twenty years ago, his self-destructive impulses were evident to a pair of junior high girls (which makes me wonder how any grown woman could become involved with him without an inkling of a dark side), and it wouldn’t be long before his alarming views of women, gays, etc. came to light.

The point is that liking Mel has always been problematic, and the window of time where his work and his personal life could be separated was woefully short. The question is: should a person’s personal life inform the way we view their work, or should the work be taken at face value? People may have avoided Edge of Darkness because Mel’s reputation is in the toilet, but that doesn’t make it a bad movie or detract from his performance in it. Even now he remains a compelling actor, and there’s a significant body of work behind him that confirms the same. For all of the awkward, fidgety, foot-in-mouth energy he emanates in interviews, his performances seem to epitomize the old Oscar Wilde quote, “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.” How can someone convey such pain and vulnerability onscreen without having some genuine understanding of the human condition?

As a movie-going public, I don’t think any of us are in a position to judge Mr. Gibson or guess at what makes him tick. It’s entirely possible that he doesn’t even know, but as an audience we do have to make a decision. Do we keep embracing the movies we have loved regardless of recent developments? Is it still okay to drool over Lethal Weapon and swoon over Forever Young and cry our way through Signs? (And don’t tell me you didn’t cry at that last supper scene or when Morgan almost died.) Is it okay to see his next movie in the theater (presuming it’s somewhat appealing), or is it better to save our pennies than to line the pockets of someone who may not exactly be deserving of the level of power that accompanies extreme wealth? (Off the top of my head, I’d rather just mail a check to Bono or some other charitable organization than fuel Mel's belief that he owns Malibu.) Moreover, I wonder how future generations will view him. At some point it seems as though the face you tried to present to the world should be given more consideration than the blemished one you wore in private.

Discuss.

Mel Gibson | Musings