The Beaver (2011, Jodie Foster)

'What?'
'Yeah'
'Really'
'Mhmmm'

Jodie Tallulah Foster's third Directorial role see's Melly G* plumeting towards self destruction and being pulled from the brink by a Beaver.

'Yeah'.

I immediatlely wanted to see this mainly for jokes, and it is. Depressing jokes.

Unfortunately Jodie has to fucking ruin any fun Melly G and The Beaver might have, by making it all serious and lowly and bawdy and quite boring and fascile and slow.

She also appears in the film, as Melly G's wife, further ruining any prospective anti-semetic wood gnawing adventures and complaining about wanting 'My real Husband back'.

In other words she is a Captain Bring-down.

The premise is pretty interesting and kind of unique; Walter Black (Melly G) invents a split personality to try and cope with extreme depression and his manifestation happens to involve a hairy beaver.

Every aspect of communication has been taken over, the beaver starts running his company, parenting his kids and fucking his wife...

The whole thing is pretty cheese filled and the storyline involving his Son (Anton Yelchin) is major balls.
He hates his Dad and is constantly listing similarities and trying to spiritually vacate any shared characteristics they have. There's a little love story where he tries to reconcile a girls mourning for her dead brother by making her DO SUM GRAFF. Please...

There was a lot of potential in this and it is a great idea. The ending is pretty rad overall but the film is very slow and fraught with a dichotomy between ultra depressing pessimism and an overt sillyness that just undermines any seriousness of the narrative.
I guess that's what Foster was trying to do, so in a way this is an astounding success.

In another way it was not very enjoyable as it failed to find the balance for me.

Interesting themes, covered in a original light and quite comedic in places, but executed poorly...

5/10

*Mel Gibson

Trailer:


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