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| Mel Gibson in The Beaver |
Cast: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Riley Thomas Stewart, Cherry Jones. Screenplay: Kyle Killen. Cinematography: Hagen Bogdanski. Production design: Mark Friedberg. Film editing: Lynzee Klingman. Music: Marcelo Zarvos.
The Beaver was a notorious box office flop, and no wonder. It starts as a serious drama about a man in the throes of a deep depression, morphs into a comic fantasy with a teen romance subplot, and then becomes a horror movie before a bloody denouement leads to a tentative resolution. How do you market a movie like that, especially when its star is getting the wrong kind of press? You can't blame it all on Mel Gibson, who demonstrates throughout the movie that he's a skilled and resourceful actor when his demons of bigotry and violence aren't being released by alcohol. It's tempting to blame Jodie Foster for taking the helm of the movie, though she manages to give it some coherence. The producers must have seen some promise in Kyle Killen's screenplay, so we might question their wisdom and taste. But mark it down to systemic failure, a reminder that making movies is a collaborative project and that collective judgment is fraught with peril.
