The Beaver

Film title: The Beaver
Tagline(s): He’s here to save Walter’s life
Director: Jodie Foster
Screenplay: Kyle Killen
Starring: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence
Cinema Release Date: 16 March 2011 (USA) 17 June 2011 (UK)
DVD Distributor: Summit Home Entertainment
DVD Release date: 10 October 2011 (UK); 23 August 2011 (USA)
Certificate: 12A (UK); PG-13 for mature thematic material, some disturbing content, sexuality and language including a drug reference (USA)



There is something lacking in all of us – a missing piece. There’s a little bit of a black spot or a dark space.

For Walter Black (Mel Gibson), that dark space has been growing for a while. He feels powerless against it, and can only watch helplessly while it engulfs him completely. He is unable to deal with life and is unhappy with the person he has become. Instead he finds it easier to just zone out, and becomes unproductive. He drifts along, going through the motions, just existing. He is absent as a father, unreliable as a husband and uninspiring as a CEO. We find him in this state in the opening scene of the movie, floating on a lilo with a glazed expression. But when his suicide attempt goes awry, Walter reaches for the beaver, a glove puppet he found in a dumpster. It is his attempt to engage with life once more – but to do so from a distance, and so he uses the Cockney puppet to communicate with everyone he meets. He believes that the darker side of his nature is so beyond help that everyone, including himself, needs to be kept away from it.

Once the beaver is on the scene, Walter is transformed as a person and things begin to change for the better. He plays with his younger son, becomes the attentive husband and takes his company to new heights with his innovation. In a way, he almost seems to finally attain that ability to engage with life, even if it is just superficially, and from behind the safety of a furry puppet. However, because he isn’t dealing with the problem of his mental illness, but with just its symptoms, things slowly begin to deteriorate behind the farce that he is living.

Director Jodie Foster, artfully details the development of the beaver from puppet to person, in both Walter’s consciousness as well as the audience’s perception. There are scenes where Walter is completely out of the frame and it becomes difficult to remember that the beaver is actually a repressed aspect of Walter’s nature that is finally being given expression in a destructive manner. The beaver almost seems to be a separate entity with a, sometimes sinister, opinion.

As Walter/the beaver puts it, "We start to see ourselves as a box that we're trapped inside and no matter how we try and escape – self help, therapy, drugs – we just sink further and further down. The only way to truly break out of the box is to get rid of it all together . . . I mean, you built it in the first place. If the people around you are breaking your spirit, who needs them? Your wife, who pretends to love you; your son, who can't even stand you – I mean, put them out of their misery!"
Sometimes we tend to place a buffer between ourselves and our weaknesses or faults, but if we aren’t careful that buffer can become our weakness. In Walter’s case, the moulting beaver causes him more harm than good. It seems for a while that the puppet is actually helping him, but when his wife, Meredith (played by Foster), finds out that the beaver is not a therapeutic measure suggested by his psychiatrist, she realises that he has become a danger to himself. Walter stubbornly refuses to get rid of the beaver, and instead watches his wife and children move out. Interestingly, throughout this time, Walter believes that he is ‘under the care’ of the puppet, and yet it is the puppet that holds him back from going after the people who love him most. With time, Walter recognises that he has to make a choice between the beaver and his family; he needs a new start, for which he will have to make a clean break and let one of them go. So in a drastic step, Walter makes a decision that alters the course of his life. It also leads him to reconcile with his family and, with their support, to deal with his mental health issues.

Marc Lee from The Telegraph captures the quality of the movie in his review, describing it as ‘dark and unsettling but funny, too, with a winning quirky charm’.1 He commends Foster’s directorial skill as she maintains a fine balance between the portrayal of the comical and dismal aspects of the story. While the movie received a hearty ten-minute standing ovation when screened at the Cannes Film Festival, it opened to mixed reviews from film critics, possibly due to the negative press surrounding Mel Gibson’s personal life. Perhaps the role of Walter Black as a disturbed and depressed individual struck too close to home to Gibson’s recent misdemeanours in real life.

The Beaver reconfirms the idea that we have virtually no control over what happens to us; that bad things happen to good people, and that pain is a part of life, the obvious moral being that escapism is not the solution. Ignoring problems will not make them go away; admitting that they exist, however, is the first step towards resolving them.

There is an aching truth behind Walter’s words, a longing for a new start, as he says in an interview,

‘We reach a point where, in order to go on, we have to wipe the slate clean. . . . Starting over isn't crazy. Crazy is being miserable and walking around half asleep, numb, day after day after day. Crazy is pretending to be happy. Pretending that the way things are is the way they have to be for the rest of your bleeding life.’

This cry for help isn’t only Walter’s cry; it is echoed by all of humanity. And according to the Bible, Jesus is the only one who has come up with a satisfying answer to that cry of desperation. In a drastic step of his own, Jesus died on the cross in our place, accepting the punishment for our rebellion and making God’s forgiveness available to us. When we come to God and admit that we have done things our own way, and that we want to accept the open invitation of a relationship with Jesus, the Bible says our past is wiped away and God forgives our disobedience. He offers us a brand new start, with him leading us through life this time round. In the light of this offer, it does seem crazy to continue being miserable, to continue living life on the surface, to continue pretending that ‘Everything will be OK,’ as Walter’s son, puts it. Through Jesus Christ, the offer to turn our lives around in now available; but ultimately the choice must be ours.

And when all is said and done, which of us would not give our right arm for a new beginning?