A constellation of family and friends has issues about expressing themselves, whether via a transitional object, “forbidden art,” or learning to like oneself...
[This entry has been slightly edited; see also the July 13 follow-up.]
Jodie Foster is an actress, distinctly more so than Drew Barrymore, whose length of career belies how relatively young she is (though Ms. Foster is now almost 50, about a year younger than I). She also seems, in her career, like a Zelig-type character who has turned up in unlikely places. She modeled for Coppertone ads, from what I heard, in the late 1960s or so. She did TV work about then (see her Wikipedia article). She had a bit part as a street urchin in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and then got her first major notice, and award nominations, as the teenage streetwalker Iris in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). She was in the first version of the film Freaky Friday in 1977.
Later, she was Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), opposite Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. She was the protective mother in the thriller Panic Room (2002), accompanied by a 11-year-old Kristen Stewart as her boyishly-short-haired daughter. Stewart, about as bare-foot-plain in 2002 as Foster arguably was in about 1976, showed some early acting chops including in displaying insulin shock that her character entered when she was in her house’s “panic room,” spurring one of the housebreaking burglars to try to help her. [See my August 30 entry on Panic Room for some important notes on the issue of diabetes as handled in that movie.]
Foster’s career has continued without tabloid-ready drug-related meltdowns or dramatic marriage-and-divorce. She has seemed like an exemplary feminist without being conscious, self-conscious, or noisy about it. Even today, when she shows her years in acting as a sort of competent but careworn middle-aged mother, there still seems something refreshingly youthful about her—not in the sense of someone who won’t grow up, but in the sense of someone who maintains the wise optimism of youth while having lost youth’s callow snarkiness, immaturity, obliviousness to the different shades of life, and so on.
So there’s an important clue when her third directing effort, The Beaver, includes her remarking on one important influence on the film in her director’s during-the-film commentary (which is helpful to listen to for you to further appreciate the movie): she says this film, like her other directing efforts, is “the story of my life,” and in a way, “the hardest part of my life.” This and many other comments on the film DVD, not least her obvious and somewhat doctrinaire sensitivity to depression (one pointed focus of the film), suggest that she has suffered long-term depression, and finally wanted to make a film that addressed this phenomenon head-on. This alone, taking a view of her decades of accomplishments, makes us want to take notice of this film.
But as we watch The Beaver more than once, and get past some of the surface quirkiness of it, we find a film that, despite its flaws, deserves more recognition (critical and popular)—not just for its taking a stand on recognizing and treating depression, but for taking an atypical approach to it: seeing how a man, who is a paterfamilias and runs a business he inherited from his father, spontaneously starts to use a transitional object as a means to start coming to grips with his depression.
A transitional object—this term was founded in the 1950s, including with work by Donald Winnicott, and has one of its most well-known pop examples in the Peanuts character Linus’s “security blanket”—is an object, often a toy, that most healthily is used by children as a stage in becoming independent from their mother. [Wikipedia has an article; I can’t vouch at this time for everything in this article.] The psychological theory you can accept or not, but the sheer phenomenon seems so widespread and harmless that it would seem cheap-spirited to argue with the theory: it says that as a child (here we are dealing with “talking therapy” concepts, not psychopharmacological) goes through a separation/individuation phase—starts to replace its dependence on the mother, with her breast/infant-nurturing function, with something else—it then uses a toy as a replacement for the mother. This replacement can be a teddy bear (cf. the current film hit Ted for a bawdy/rowdy artistic exploitation of this phenomenon) or a doll. (By the way, has anyone other than me asked how weird the “American Girl” thing is? I.e., having a doll that looks like you? As if we don’t have enough problems in this society already with objectification of women.)
In the study of aspects of borderline personality disorder, it is noted that sufferers of BPD can make atypical (unhealthy) use of transitional objects (see, e.g., Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus, I Hate You—don’t leave me: Understanding the Borderline Personality [New York: Avon Books, 1989], pp. 52-3). BPD and depression aren’t exactly identical, but there is significant overlap. Of course, as an anecdotal thing, sufferers of BPD often report depression as their main complaint in consulting with helping professionals; and after they’ve been treated for BPD, they can end up being more discreet (than when in crisis) in talking about their condition, and say they have (merely) depression.
So whether or not Mel Gibson’s character Walter Black in The Beaver is a case of BPD or, more ostensibly noted in the film, depression, he starts to make a rather creative use of a transitional object, a beaver-like puppet, as a way to turn a corner in his depressive state: he finds a new way to express himself and function in a seemingly healthy way, including in his relations with family and at work. Whether or not you feel this is an outlandish, unlikely premise, I think it is plausible and worthwhile to consider along these lines: this may be an uncommon pass for a depressive person to come to, but not impossible; and depending how richly the story treats it, the story may still hold representative or edifying value for others.
More to the end of appreciating this film, Walter’s development shows that when long-term depression so badly challenges its sufferers—and challenges “collaterally damaged” family members—sudden new stratagems for “being a self-directing person” may emerge, which may be salutary in the short term. But in Walter Black’s case, this sort of thing ends up leading to tragic results—but in the process, he finds that it is up to him to come to the strongest terms with his depression.
Whether or not you find that this tale of depression seems a bit too lark-y, you have to admit that Mel Gibson’s acting as Walter with the puppet is a sight to behold. The film also raises some interesting points about how both Foster and Gibson make their work in this film relate to their own life. You remember my comment about Foster’s apparent experience with depression above. Also, Gibson is no stranger to something related to depression; his Wikipedia bio has a subsection on “Alcohol abuse and legal issues” that suggests he is bipolar (manic depressive)—this point referenced to a 2008 Australian interview. Thus The Beaver is interesting to see for Foster’s and Gibson’s own lives helping inform (1) the film’s comment on depression as a purely artistic and educational level and (2) its making use of, and indirectly referring to, their own different experiences with depression, in a way that ultimately, I think, makes this film a touching effort—not sentimental, but poignant and on the heroic side.
Preliminaries, 1: “Alternate personality”
Let’s get some things out of the way. The use by Gibson’s character Walter of a transitional object, through which he “ventriloquizes” with its voice, is not an instance of “split personality.” Those who think that such a way of playfully (and as a sort of defense mechanism, we might say) having an “alternative voice” is a matter of “split personality”—or, as people show their ignorance in confusing concepts, “schizophrenia”—need to be told: “Split personality,” or multiple personality disorder (the older term) or dissociative identity disorder (the newer, DSM term) is one thing, schizophrenia is another, and bipolar disorder is yet another. Schizophrenia involves extreme deterioration of the personality, including thought disorder such as delusions; bipolar disorder, or “manic depression” (the older term), is largely a mood disorder that may feature delusions but more definitively involves problems with mood and related self-image.
There are other psychological phenomena involving what could be called a lack of functional integrity: borderline personality disorder features this; any specific symptoms that involve what has been called “ego dystonia” (“that is not me”; “those thoughts aren’t mine”); and in a sense any disorder that cuts one off from one’s previously more usual identity-defining living, such as a fear of heights or of germs or of bugs that leads one to start drawing significantly hampering divisions in what one will get involved with, etc.
Something like using a transitional object and displaying personality through that is a different matter. I have exercised—as I’m sure many other people have—a version of this (which I should hope wasn’t pathological) when I used to play a game with my nephews when they were a lot younger, using dinosaur puppets to playfully interact with them. (They looked forward to this within a period of a few years.) Children, obviously, are delighted by this sort of thing, as is shown in how the young actor Riley Thomas Stewart lights up when Mel Gibson does his puppet routine with him. Children seem to like that because with it, an adult is being playful in a way a child doesn’t ordinarily see in an adult.
If some people were to say, “Well, I’m not a psychologist…”—fine. But believe it or not, even people who practice in the psychological fields get confused (more blameworthily) on these things. Some such professionals think schizophrenia is split personality (several years ago, I heard a doctor at Newton Memorial Hospital in Sussex County, N.J., saying some lower-level professionals there believed that)—and in my opinion, any psych professional who thinks this should not be practicing in his or her field, whatever it is (social work, psychologist, etc.). It’s like thinking the leg bone is connected to the wrist bone.
Mel Gibson as hot potato, yet essential to this story
One player in this film who might raise more hackles than anyone else is Mr. Gibson. I don’t follow his career extremely closely; I liked his film Braveheart, which I last saw in about 1995, when it was out in theaters. He was in the Mad Max movies, one of which I saw (he was an acting neophyte then). The Lethal Weapon films, or whatever of that ilk he was in, I never would have seen. More recently, and controversially, he has pursued his more spiritual concerns in The Passion of the Christ (2004), which I never would have seen. Though I didn’t see it (but closely read reviews of it), I personally felt it made both a misuse of Christ’s life and a misuse of cinema as an art form.
Another film he helped helm, which he produced and only appeared in in a cameo, was Paparazzi (2004), which was interesting but highly tendentious, with the controversial actor Tom Sizemore as a near-psychotic paparazzo.
Among Gibson’s more controversial behavior have been anti-Semitic rants when he has been arrested for drunk driving or the like. This, combined with the criticized depictions of Jewish townspeople in The Passion in line with the old canard of Jews as “Christ killers,” has led some to take a dim view of Gibson in recent times, as a sort of failed celebrity of a particularly vivid sort. Very recently there have been gossip-column reports of his unfortunate turn in having a restraining order sought by a relative amid some severe issues concerning another relative.
My purpose here is not to endorse Gibson as to his controversial views or the like, but to note that, to the extent his more aberrant recent behavior may reflect bipolar disorder (combined with unwillingness to take better care of himself), the choice of him for The Beaver is useful—Jodie Foster may have felt that Gibson’s “duality” as a talent and yet as a wounded soul, and his alternating between depression and occasional mania, make him ideal in terms of being able to convey this kind of personality “swingy-ness” and yet (if he could) have a humor and generosity about it, that some other actor might not be able to achieve. This plus the mere public-relations baggage Gibson carries might have raised audience expectations to see just how Gibson comes to terms with a depressive-yet-creative character in this movie.
In any event, I think his performance is the main one of interest and source of entertainment in this film, though clearly this is an ensemble piece, and importantly about family, not just about one colorful personality.
The story
Walter Black (Gibson) is the son of a man who founded a toy-producing company, Jerry Co., of which Walter is now president; his father has died, and as we find from a subtle reference at a dinner table, his father had committed suicide. This is one element of what Foster points out in commentary as a sort of clinical picture of a highly potentiated depression situation: if Walter’s dad had depression enough to commit suicide, Walter obviously has it, as is described in many particulars at the start of the film, in the Beaver’s blue-collar Australian manner in a voiceover. Moreover, Walter’s son Porter, played by the resourceful Anton Yelchin (age about 22), also is at risk of developing depression—to the extent that, in a sort of obsessive-compulsive way, he seems to have it already: he keeps a big set of Post-its on a wall in his room, each with a symptom of his father’s he sees in himself and wants to get rid of; he even has, we later find, a map of places he wants to get rid of these symptoms, bit by bit, across the country. He also has a more blunt way of dealing with stress/anger/whatever, not least triggered by his father (whom he consciously wishes not to be in the deepest, most thoroughgoing way possible): he bangs his head against a wall, now and then; eventually, an outside shingle falls off the side of the house and reveals a hole he has made.
Walter (and his wife Meredith, played by Foster) has another child, Henry, played by the cute towhead Riley Thomas Stewart. Henry’s experience of fallout from his dad’s depression seems to be his having become isolated at school and bullied/teased by others.
Meredith deals with all of this in a busy, conscientious, but nerves-frayed way; she is a professional engineer (she designs roller-coasters!)…and has enough means, it seems, that near the film’s beginning, she has led Walter to leave the house because, as happens in other homes in real life as a sad, virtually unavoidable development, his family (Meredith not least) can’t take his depression any longer.
So Walter, ending up in a hotel room with a meager set of belongings and a box full of booze bottles, and having saved a tatty beaver puppet from the garbage he removed from his car, fashions a noose and tries to hang himself in the bathroom. The shower rod breaks off the wall, and Walter ambles out to a balcony, noose and shower rod still attached to him. He is about to jump when the beaver puppet, oddly on his hand already, greets him with an Australian-accented “Oy!” Walter tumbles back and ends up on the floor. TV comes down on him, and he’s out cold for a while.
After an initial interesting confrontation between Walter and the newly christened The Beaver in his motel room, Walter heads back home with his puppet allowing him to show personality and industriousness again. But it’s all, Howdy-Doody style, through the puppet. At first he and Henry build a wooden contraption with tools and wood from the garage—Henry is delighted by The Beaver, as kids naturally would be. When Meredith comes home, taken aback, Walter offers a card containing a typed ostensible explanation by his psychiatrist, as if The Beaver is part of a new treatment program. Of course, this last detail is a ruse by Walter to cover up that The Beaver is something spontaneously emanating from him alone. (Walter has stopped seeing his psychiatrist for a longish period.)
Walter is taken back into family activity—dinner, etc.—much to Porter’s disgust when he comes home, and reminds his mother that she has taken years to get Walter out of the house only to let him back in with a “talking hamster.”
Thus begins a sort of roller-coaster ride of a plot—with Walter first being generally reconciled with his family, The Beaver doing almost all his talking, emoting, and spearheading activities for him. This preludes Walter/The Beaver’s coming up with a new toy idea for his company (after he has introduced his Beaver “persona” to his company staff, many of whom regard the two of them with understandable skepticism and semi-scorn), which actually becomes a hit (in the spring, not at Christmastime) with the toy-buying public. Walter eventually swings more toward the negative side of the manic when he becomes unable to distinguish between himself and The Beaver, while The Beaver seems to take over as more than a mere little sit-in.
What happens in the downward trajectory of the drama arc I defer comment on.
Family—and even a girlfriend—show a sort of inability to “fully be themselves”
Porter, the most complex young person in this complex story and ensemble feast, not only obsesses about not becoming like his father, but he also has a deviant side at school. Apparently smart enough to write papers like a studently Superman, he writes papers for fellow students at $200 a pop. Eventually, the apple of his eye, Nora, a cheerleader and the class valedictorian, who can do her own papers thank you, wants him to write her graduation speech, which is the one thing, after hundreds of pages of drafts, she can’t do.
Nora, Porter finds when they congregate together more, has a “secreted-away” side of her own. Ordinarily overachieving, she actually has done painting of a more Dionysian kind—graffiti-like drawing with spray paint or the like that has gotten her in trouble with the law (for vandalism, I guess). She says she likes to do it quickly…. It sounds a bit like a way of being manic of her own.
Nora is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who seems fine for a part that I think is the least well developed in the film (Foster comments that Nora’s role was rewritten to fit Lawrence better). The notion of a “perfect Apollonian female student who has a Dionysian potential” that isn’t normally allowed an outlet is an idea so trite, I think, that—I’ll tell you how trite. In 1977, when I wrote my first set of short stories, wanting to become a published writer some day, one of the most important stories, “Another Fallen Woman,” was about an excellent female student who degrades into a life of drugs, sex, etc.—which was a response, in part, to the teen rebel insanity I saw around me at the time, and was vaguely inspired by the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I think I knew my story idea was a rather hackneyed (if morally important) idea at the time.
In any event, I think the Nora character’s being a little crudely written and trite in general is not bad for the film—it is a sort of “repeating a key thematic figure” in the film: the individual who can’t express him or herself in a unified way, therefore has a deviant way of expressing a “forbidden” side.
Lawrence is good for this because, as can be seen in Winter’s Bone (see my May 15 blog entry), she has a beautiful, almost inert china-doll appearance that contrasts with a sort of somewhat laconic but well-turned power in her expressions, through voice and eyes. In this film, her tall, erect bearing—and even her rather long neck—which makes her seem like a cross between a beautiful woman and an elongated figure pained by El Greco—seems to be well suited to a character who is a straight-arrow cheerleader and 4.0 student. Yet Lawrence has a dramatic capability that I think can be described metaphorically this way: with her muted-expression looks, she can surprise with performance like Eric Clapton, who can seem almost boringly laconic and expressionless yet produce lyrical blues playing (which inevitably conveys rich expression), or like the lead guitarist in Paul McCartney’s Wings, Jimmy McCulloch, who when shoe-horned into small breaks by McCartney’s radio-friendly compositions could still play blues figures that showed more power for being compressed in time. So we can believe that straight-arrow Nora has the potential underneath to do her crazy graffiti-type painting…and of course, this intrigues Porter, who works to try to build a relationship with her even as she hires him to write her graduation speech.
Porter, though, being a depressive kid, fumbles when trying to “reach” her and crudely exposes (in a Brooklyn Navy Yard scene) her secret that helps explain a certain repressedness about her: she is grieving for her deceased brother, who had O.D.’d. Nora is strongly offended by Porter’s blunt inroads, and they part ways for a time.
Porter and Nora reconcile…and near the film’s end, she reads her graduation speech, written by him, which includes the idea that seems an emblem of the movie’s central theme, that it is a lie when people say “Everything is going to be OK.” This echoes an important line, in real life, in a friend’s e-mail to me in 2006, when her niece, in her twenties, and suffering from apparent borderline personality disorder, committed suicide. The friend represented to me something she clearly meant me to understand that she felt her sister, the niece’s mother, had tragically failed to understand: I paraphrase, “Everything can’t be all right when it’s not.”
People fail to see the emotional rot that a depressive sometimes is dealing with. The depressive him or herself, try as he or she might, has immense trouble with that emotional rot.
And this problem, whether you see it as existential, theological, medical, or otherwise, is a central problem of living that Foster tries earnestly to treat thematically in a film about, depressing as it is, clinical depression. The story involves family, echoed-among-others personality issues, humor and more serious episodes, and a general complexity that you appreciate on repeated viewings and hearing some things explained helpfully in commentary.
This film as a success—in various ways
Critic Roger Ebert, according to the film’s Wikipedia article, gave the film two and a half stars, and opined, “The Beaver is almost successful, despite the premise of its screenplay, which I was simply unable to accept.” If what he can’t swallow is how The Beaver is a temporary sort of miracle for Walter Black, that’s too bad, because I think the conceit works better than numerous people might think. Even if this seems a quirky device to use in a film about depression, I think the film raises enough ideas to consider about how we deal with the positives and negatives of life, and how a family may deal with the problem of mental illness within one member (and as a more genetic predisposition spread out among family members), that it is worthwhile as a semi-educational, semi-entertaining work to get us to talk and think about these things.
The photography is generally tasteful and the editing is good. The technical flaws lie more with the script that with the production. Foster as Meredith sometimes seems to try a little too hard with some line readings, but as generally being a vulnerable yet power-asserting character, she is usually good in the role. But her role is secondary to Walter’s and, in some sense, Porter’s. Lawrence as a sort of minor (but still important enough) character is good not just for the story but for marketing purposes; Yelchin and Lawrence obviously make good marketing sense to draw in the young fans. Gibson, of course, not only is the acting star for the most part, but how he is lit to emphasize a sort of careworn, timeworn appearance—slightly like Bette Davis in What Ever Became of Baby Jane?—is useful and, one might say, generous of him.
Cherry Jones is on hand as the V.P. at Walter’s company (and as the Jerry Co. employee who quite understandably might think regarding Walter, “If he wasn’t the son of the company’s founder, as lovable as he is, he should be escorted out the door, with delicacy in retrieving the electronic door key and Security on hand as he trundles out the door with cardboard box bearing ephemera from his desk—and be sure The Beaver goes with him, with his mouth taped shut”).
The Beaver was made on a budget of $20 million and made only $6.37 million at the box office—a shame. Its production team included Anonymous Content and Participant Media (I don’t know anything about them—though I think Participant helped produce Tom McCarthy’s film The Visitor). Production financing also came from a firm called Imagenation [sic] Abu Dhabi, a firm apparently located guess where; one of these latter producers (let's thank him) is named in narrow-type credits on the DVD case.
The film has an IMDB rating of 6.7/10, and its Rotten Tomatoes rating seems around 60%. I think it deserves better.
If we seek some reason this film was not a hit at all, a look at one aspect of its crafting can help.
The music—Foster notes she likes it for this film—is sometimes reminiscent of that for Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men (2003)—both feature what sound like accordion in a sort of underscoring music that seems to hover between a kind of irony about the topics of the story (which topics can often be sad), yet which tries not to make too much light of these topics, but tries to create a kind of droll-attitude-yet-affectionate mood. In Matchstick Men, the mental illness theme—Roy (played by Nicholas Cage) is obsessive-compulsive and seems to suffer from Tourette’s syndrome (with his tics), yet becomes more normal when he is acting as a con man; his partner (played by Sam Rockwell) eventually cons him out of his wealth with use of a young woman pretending to be Roy’s long-lost 14-year-old daughter, introducing a family-warmth theme. Mental illness and family themes, in this film, seem secondary to a kind of lark comedy with a rather jaundiced point of view. In The Beaver, the humor—which can get to such a point where The Beaver, on Walter’s hand, is panting after Walter has had sex with Meredith—is secondary to the earnest themes related to mental illness and family that the film takes pains to detail in a host of ways.
Perhaps people were turned off by The Beaver because it wasn’t more go-for-broke with humor—and not so serious about depression. One aspect of planning that Foster explains is whether the beaver puppet should have had moving, CGI-generated eyes or not. I think she made the right choice, to have the beaver just be a goofy toy, with its being “plausible” as a character lying mainly in our imagination, similar to how Walter would have entertained this, and how his little son Henry would entertain this. If a fantasy touch of having moving eyes was introduced, God help us that we can’t even have a film this serious without fantasy chocolate smothering it.
Final notes
