I had wanted to correct and follow up my July 6 review of The Beaver, and through a few viewings of it, really wanted to give careful consideration to this movie. I think the original review says about all it needs to, but I think what additional stuff needs to be said generally relates to the downward trajectory of the film’s drama arc, and gets to the heart of what some have found puzzling or flawed about this film.
I won’t divulge what most dramatically happens to Walter/The Beaver as he starts to “lose it” after The Beaver has given him some new emotional life of a sort for a period. Suffice it to say that what happens to Walter may strike some as a shock (he lives, though), but director Jodie Foster felt it was an essential part of the story. In fact, as she says in during-the-movie commentary, Summit Entertainment, the studio that was the essential distributor of the film, was the only studio/distributor that would accept the film project with the plot element I am referring to. She said it was a deal-breaker for all other studios; and for her, the loss of this element was a deal-breaker for her.
This element is a sort of “tragic outcome” of the story element posed by The Beaver, which of course is the “character” or “character trait” that some people have found hard to swallow with this film. Both Roger Ebert (whom I quoted in my original review) and Leonard Maltin in his paperback compendium of reviews give the film two and a half stars out of four; I would tend to give it three, but I have some reservations, and in good part they relate to the following.
How depression is dealt with—as a health issue, and as a story theme
Granted, the film is about depression to a large extent. If you watch the DVD, I recommend that you watch it, in addition to straight without commentary, with Jodie Foster’s director’s commentary. Widely known as smart, she shows she was being smart with how she handled this film, as she analyzes how scenes work and how sequences show such things as the character parallels between Walter and Porter (incidentally, Porter’s story is the most poignant of the film: a young man who seems so much at risk of becoming like his father—even his hairline is similar—that he is obsessed with getting rid of his father’s traits).
She shows her genuine interest in treating the issue of depression, on which I said in my original review she has a “somewhat doctrinaire sensitivity to depression”; what led me to say this—not meaning to be unsympathetic—was her noting that Walter has “chemical depression”—meaning, endogenous, a matter of a “biochemical predisposition,” a sort of concept that strong critics of psychiatry hate. As Foster says, Walter has a kind of depression that “needs medication, time, and work.” In general I don’t have any beef with how she discusses depression this way; this is a good standard way to describe the more endogenous kind of the depression; and then the question is, how do you address it in art? The fact that “depression just looked at for the appalling wet blanket it is” can in itself be a downer is suggested, to me, by the Beaver-narrated introduction to Walter at the start of the film, at which we might say, “Uh oh, a depressive lump. Why do we care about him?”
The story of The Beaver is how a man, who seems to enjoy a temporary respite from his depression via use of a transitional object, is actually evading dealing with it the way he should, and he pays a price for this—a rather appalling price. But he does start to get his life back in the end of the process the film depicts. This, I think, is the “moral nexus” that attracted Jodie Foster to the project—and she does take pains to say that she thinks the film has a moral truth, and it is safe to presume she had dedication to it for this reason. Accordingly, she spends a lot of time in the making-of doc and the during-the-film documentary both explaining some of the issues of depression as relate to Walter’s character arc…and also talking about the marketing challenges of this movie.
Film’s consciousness of “evil” becomes a tricky thing to sell
The marketing challenges, themselves, show, in a broader sense across many movies, where we’re at with serious topics in the movies today. Foster herself remarks that the film has a “European” side in its sporadically dark aspect—which I would agree with, in a sympathetic sense (this is one reason she says the occasionally European-inflected underscore music is appropriate). Mel Gibson, in his own game making-of-doc comments, refers to the film having a “dark” side. It seems most of the major players comment on some way in which the film deals with both the dark and lighter sides of life; as Jennifer Lawrence says in the doc (I paraphrase), “Life isn’t always a comedy—it can be tragic; but then bad things can happen, and they can be funny.” So the film has to deal with the indubitable “downer” of depression—and I think another challenge is for it to deal both with longer-term, steady-grind depression, and more crisis-time despair—and also, over the longer term, the comic (or darkly comic, and occasionally absurd) situations you can get into while dealing with depression. This seems like a lot for the film to take on, and I don’t know as it handles all of these especially well, or consistently well.
I appreciate this situation very much. Any creative project I’ve worked with myself that dealt with a major-tragedy or despair-related issue posed a problem in how you made it more generally accessible, and in how you square with the need, which I think is a major philosophic one, of getting a good laugh in amid whatever dark trial you are going through. This isn’t simply to pander to small minds but to acknowledge that life is complex, and that, to the extent you can sum it up in a glib Sunday-school phrase, life has its despair/death-dealing sides and its happier/transcendent sides, and the real trick is how you relate these two—what kind of mixed-tone fabric you are making life out to be.
There seems so much talk in commentary in this film about its trickiness in balancing different tones, in dealing with what seems the occasionally insipidly expressed theme of “Life has its ups and downs” (which runs a risk of sounding like the truism “Everything is going to be OK” that the film makes a point of criticizing); and even producer Steve Golin, who probably had a key shepherding role with this film, remarks in the making-of doc that this film is “hard to pigeonhole.”
You see where we are today that, in the 1970s, you can have a beastly noir like Taxi Driver splashed up willy-nilly on movie screens nationwide, and people could take it or leave it, and today there is so much fussing and debating over marketing considerations that, even among the actors who loved The Beaver’s message and potential, it seems you are listening to movie-appreciation professors busily bending over backwards to explain what the film is about and, implicitly, why it is worth your time, to people who apparently seem very thick about watching some entertainment that, dare we say it, deals with dark things in life.
This sometimes-dark film has a “sunny” future
I think this film will become a cult favorite, among those who like psychologically based stories, somewhat similar to Harold and Maude (1971), and roughly similar to Heathers (1989), and others that, from a mainstream-audience perspective, may seem “prohibitively dark.” Jodie Foster remarks she feels The Beaver has a deep emotional truth to it…and I think this is one way to look at it, which is similar to that of the Hitchcock masterpiece Vertigo (1958). This latter film has a plot that may seem like an intricate, even labyrinthine tale of an appalling con-game, but it carries an emotional theme that is the focus of the truly great work of art that Vertigo is—an emotional theme about the relationship of love and death, and love and fear, centering on James Stewart’s Scotty falling in love, amid fearful concern for a fragile person in his charge, in Kim Novak’s Madeline amid her haunted, self-endangering, depressive-type sojourn.
