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90I suppose the perfect ending to the chapter would be to report that The Beaver is a masterpiece. It isn't quite, but it does offer an astonishing and resonant performance by Gibson, who spends most of the movie playing two simultaneous characters, often in the same shot.
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75The Beaver also has a tendency to slip around as it finds its footing. But then the powerful third act comes and Foster, with Gibson's help, hits it home.
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75An often moving and always disturbing film. Little is explained, motivations aren't explored. We miss them, at times. It's still a film of power, wit and thought-provoking ideas, one well worth seeing.
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75The Beaver isn't a perfect film, but it's challenging and original.
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75That this ambitious, if deeply odd, film is so compulsively watchable is a credit to Gibson's compelling performances, both as spiritless Walter and the Cockney-accented voice of the tireless title character.
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75This bizarre little movie is all over the place as drama - but genuinely compelling as a one-of-a-kind piece of public self-flagellation.
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75The Beaver is at its core a classically Oedipal tale. While one son angles in all the wrong ways for his abject father's attention, another engages in a heroic struggle with his abusive bully of a dad.
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75The Beaver, directed by Jodie Foster from a script by fearless first-timer Kyle Killen, is operating on a plane far above multiplex formula. This flawed but heartfelt movie has the power to sneak up and floor you.
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75Whatever you think of Mr. Gibson, whatever he has lost, he still has talent, and here displays acting of power and resonance. It's a pleasure, for a change, to see the best side of his split personality at work.
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75With tightly controlled performances and uniquely eccentric events, The Beaver is mainly undone by the lack of a satisfying outcome.
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70Gibson's performance, at times subtle, at times showy and never less than remarkable, is what makes The Beaver worth seeing.
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70Bizarre and belabored, yet grimly fascinating.
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May 5, 201170Most of the observations about suburban malaise (down to the Ayn Rand-style, self-empowering "solutions") suggest "American Beauty." Yet this is often quite affecting for its portrait of midlife crisis and Gibson's personal investment in the role.
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70Foster's performance is crisp and forthright and surprisingly moving. There's something affecting about watching this disciplined, no-nonsense actress deliver her lines to a hand puppet - she's always game, if not exactly relaxed.
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70The Beaver is serious about portraying mental illness. And whatever your opinion about Gibson the man, so is Gibson the actor.
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70A risky bet that pays off solidly, Jodie Foster's much-delayed The Beaver survives its life/art parallels -- thanks to its star, Mel Gibson -- to deliver a hopeful portrait of mental illness that is quirky, serious and sensitive.
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67While The Beaver starts with Gibson in "What Women Want" slapstick mode, it eventually goes to such exaggerated, extreme places that it becomes as much of a must-watch train-wreck as Gibson's own real-life situation.
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67This is high-quality work from a professional (Gibson) who, news reports have suggested, has recently sunk to terrible lows in his nonprofessional life.
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63The film has a huge heart, and it's in the right place.
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63The story lacks honesty. For a film about the real problem of mental illness, it never feels authentic. Depression is not something neatly tied up. If this is meant as an allegory, it's vague and unconvincing.
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May 5, 201163In a triumph of cinema over celebrity gossip, The Beaver mostly makes us forget about Gibson's madman persona and simply draws us into the story that he and director Jodie Foster, who also plays Walter's wife, Meredith, want to tell.
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63Director Jodie Foster's film reasserts the feverish, defiant, often gripping talent of actor Mel Gibson.
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63As good as Gibson is, his character is still caught between the tragedy of the man and the absurdity of the Beaver. Fugitive thoughts of Señor Wences crept into my mind. I'm sorry, but they did.
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Jun 18, 201160An awkward stew between "American Beauty" and "Harvey" that only touches a nerve at the eleventh hour.
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60Don't expect the puppet to wisecrack - there's more pain here than in "The Passion Of The Christ." It never quite comes together in a satisfying way, but it's still a brave, strange, brain-stirring piece of filmmaking.
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60Oddly engrossing, off-kilter drama.
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60Gibson simply turns his signature righteous rage into a crushing inward sorrow-Sad Max?-and Foster boldly plays everything straight, rendering her actor's unnerving turn to mania (and a pitch-black third act) with zero tongue-in-cheek.
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50The Beaver plays like a thickly veiled confessional and plea for forgiveness. It's too creepy for comfort.
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50The storyline would appear trite and the message muddled even to someone who'd never heard the name Mel Gibson.
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50I respected The Beaver for having the conviction to treat mental illness seriously and without compromise. But did it have to be so maudlin, too?
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50Clearly, the screenplay is looking for some black comedy here, but Foster's direction is too earnest to locate it.
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50An emotional runaway of a film that carries neither the insight nor the uplift to make the weight of its dark journey worth it.
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50Nasty, brutish and as cuddly as a crusty old sock fished out of a sewer, the beaver or the beav, as I like to think of him, owns the film.
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50The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.
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50Foster commendably stretches beyond her comfort zone with The Beaver, but in the end the film's high-concept premise is at war with its conventional direction.
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50Perhaps that's the problem. Mel's character isn't on Prozac, but the movie is-a succession of bland camera setups, cued to a highly conventional score. Would that the direction were half as nutty as the script or as wacked-out as its star!
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50Gibson is better in the later scenes, when Walter tries to escape the Beaver's nefarious influence. And Gibson's never bad. It's just that we know how much is missing. As a raging nutcase, he's capable of so much more.
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May 2, 201150The troubled actor delivers a performance very few could pull off as a depressed father who begins communicating through a hand puppet, but Foster doesn't know how to manage it or navigate the script's seismic tonal shifts, and ends up producing a film that's deeply strange, yet incapable of leaving an impression.
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42Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.
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40As director, Foster, working with Kyle Killen's screenplay, treats the goofy premise with a literal earnestness-as a family drama about separation and reunion-that seems all wrong. A little wit would have helped.