Deserving of box office support is THE BEAVER (M) Jodie Foster’s film features an audacious star turn from Mel Gibson. Hand in glove with a puppet Beaver and vocally channelling Ray Winstone, mad Mel plays a toymaker well past the verge of nervous breakdown.

The subject is depression, deep and inexplicable and it’s handled in such an original, offbeat way that it becomes a fascinating and engaging entertainment, almost kicking and screaming against what many audiences would baulk at.

Mel Gibson plays Walter Black, black by name and mood, rock bottom in the abyss of depression, with a coping mechanism that’s copped out until he sticks his arm up a beaver’s backside – that’s the posterior of a puppet – and bingo!, he’s able to function again, as long as the puppet is appended. His long suffering wife, played by helmer, Jodie Foster, and the youngest of their two sons, Riley Thomas Stewart, humour hubby and dad, but elder son, Anton Yelchin, finds this transference yet another flaw in his flipped out father.

Yelchin’s performance as the distancing son of a deranged dad is quite compelling, down to chronicling his qualms that the condition could well be hereditary and being protectively defensive of his mother and brother.

Add to this his burgeoning romance with a fellow student – another assured performance from rising star Jennifer Lawrence of last year’s Winter Bone, -a teenager also touched by the tragedy of depression, his mental stability teeters and threatens to tip.

THE BEAVER is a strange, brave film with an audacity that’s to be applauded. It’s the best of Jodie Foster’s three directorial efforts so far, and a robust reminder of just how good an actor Mel Gibson is.

Richard Cotter

4th August, 2011