The Beaver (2011)

There is a moment in The Beaver when a grown man in a suit discusses quarterly projections through a hand puppet, and the film asks us to accept this as a breakthrough. Jodie Foster directs with a straight face and a steady hand, treating Walter Black's collapse with the earnestness of a case study. The puppet is not a joke to anyone on screen. This is either courage or a failure of nerve, and the film never quite decides. What it does decide, with some conviction, is that mental illness deserves the full weight of a two-hour drama, and on that count it delivers a portrait of depression, dissociation, and eventual institutionalization that is handled with real seriousness. The psychiatric hospital is not a punchline here. It is the destination.

The surrounding apparatus is thinner. A toy company teeters toward bankruptcy, and commerce drifts through the frame as scenery, never as indictment. Cherry Jones appears as a company vice president, a competent woman in a boardroom, and the film notes her existence without building anything on it. Jennifer Lawrence plays Norah, a grieving sister who delivers a graduation speech that pivots into a confession about truth and loss, and the camera lingers there a beat too long, sermonizing about honesty in a way that belongs to a different, more instructional movie. The cast is white in the manner of a 1990s studio drama, which is to say nobody in the production appears to have noticed.

What remains is a curious artifact: a film about a man who cannot speak without a prosthesis, made by a director who never blinks. Mel Gibson's performance is committed, unnerving, and impossible to watch cleanly given the headlines that trailed it. The film wants to be about recovery. Mostly it is about how strange sincerity looks when nobody in the room is laughing. A flop, and an honest one, which is its own kind of distinction.