Mr Beaver - 2011

A strange movie, that's for sure. I liked some aspects of it but was not convinced by others. Still, not as bad as I feared.
It's a story of a very troubled man, Walter (Mel Gibson). He had a business company, a loving wife, two sons, but in the last years he suffered from some sort of deep depression that made him lose everything. Meredith (Jodie Foster) left him despite loving him very much, not able to cope with the situation any more and not wanting her sons to witness it.
Left alone, he tries to kill himself. Honestly, when he tried to hang himself in the bathroom it should have been a dramatic scene I suppose but it just looked silly; how could he think that thing could bear his weight? On the other hand, maybe something inside him didn't really want to die, so: moving on. He had previously seen a stuffed beaver puppet in a garbage bin and he had picked it up (I really hope he washed it at least, yeuch). Now that beaver starts 'talking' to him, getting the suicide-idea out of his head, telling him he'll help him, that everybody needs a friend. At least I'm glad there was no pretence that the beaver actually spoke, Gibson speaks clearly with no attempt at hiding it, using only some kind of southern accent when impersonating the beaver. It's like a mask, in a way. It's like, not being able to cope with the world on your own, so deciding to hide behind someone or something else. With the beaver to speak for him, he manages to live again. From now on, every scene with Gibson, sorry, with Walter features his left hand inside the beaver puppet (thinking about it, wasn't the right hand when he was in bed with Meredith?)
Each and every scene: at home, at work, on television, at the police station, wherever he goes, the beaver speaks for him. I must give it to them, Foster and Gibson did a good job, because after what I told you I'll add that I did not go 'come on, that's stupid' every five seconds.
I have no idea if this plausible or realistic, but this (I'll call it transfert, but I'm not a psychologist) seems anyway possible to me, because Walter's head clearly needed to escape, to run away from himself. That's what I think this is about. His brain struggled for a way to survive his suffocating emotions, but it wasn't a single episode it could try to forget, it was his own life, his being.
The beaver said clearly that the past was gone, that the man he was was gone.
Anyway, through the beaver (called Mr Beaver of course) and referring to himself as Walter, in the third person, he manages to get back into 'normal' life. Back to his wife, and to his work.
The youngest son is but a child, so he obviously has no problem with it. His wife doubts his sanity at first, but he tells her it's a new form of therapy, so she tries to be patient and supportive, and it cannot have been easy, the beaver was there 24/7, even in bed, even while making love.
At work, hard to believe as it might be, they all gave him (well, him and the beaver) a chance. Maybe because they had nothing to lose, they were facing failure, who knows.
He got an idea from his son. The child was happy when they made wood things together, and he liked when his dad talked to him (maybe because of the beaver's funny accent or maybe because he simply liked to spend time with his father, that's the thing children need the most) so his company's new toy will be: tools and a beaver. He even gives tv interviews with the puppet.
Sidestory: his son Porter (Anton Yelchin) is a teenager and his specialty is writing papers for others, mimicking their own style. Norah (Jennifer Lawrence) asks for his help. She's successful at school, class valedictorian, but she's not satisfied with her attempts to write her final speech. This story is nice because they're both troubled: she lost her beloved brother and has not been able to deal with his death, while he hides himself behind other people's styles instead of finding his own. Yet their story lacked something, didn't really get to me like it should have. It had no soul, only an attempt at it.
Back to Walter, the next phase is quite intense: he can't face anything without the beaver. At their anniversary dinner, Meredith refuses to sit in a fancy restaurant talking to a beaver puppet, and demands to speak to him. It was great acting. She tried her best to bring her husband back to her, while Walter was evidently in pain, he didn't know what to say or what to do, it was too much for him, and when she showed him old pictures, the beaver took over to protect him, yelling at her, saying that Walter will never again be what he once was, asking her if she wanted him dead, making a scene until Walter ran out of the restaurant leaving her there. You know, like : 'you made him commit suicide but I saved his file' kind of thing.
Meredith takes her two sons and leaves him again. He loves his family, doesn't want to lose them, but the beaver has control over him now. We see how serious it is when he says to a woman at work (his secretary? his 'number one' in the company? don't know) that the beaver is actually alive, and her expression is priceless, and also our own: fear he has lost it.
The beaver won't even let him talk to Meredith, and they even have a big physical fight! The beaver says he'll never leave Walter because it loves him more than anyone else and maybe that made Walter realize that he loved his family more than he needed/wanted the beaver. Anyway, he wanted to get rid of it, so he took extreme measures, exactly the one I thought. Not able to bring himself to take his arm out of the puppet, he built a little wooden coffin then cut off his own arm to kill the beaver. Porter found him and called for help (we didn't see anything bloody, appreciate that, it had nothing to do with the movie). Now he's free of the beaver and he allows the doctor to help him.
Norah gives a speech about how 'everything will be fine' is nothing but a lie, and about how she and many others feel, saying we don't have to bear it alone. The very last scene shows images of how things will be: better. Porter with Norah and Walter back to his family.
One thing I'm not sure about: all the beaver-tools that we seen in the garbage or much discounted mean that his idea didn't sell?

There was a lot of talk when this movie came out, because Gibson was in some kind of trouble, I don't know what it was with him, but he said out loud things he shouldn't have and it seemed like Jodie Foster was giving him the chance to make peace with the public. Personally I was never a big fan or a big antagonist, plus I watched the movie five years later so I was not biased by any personal feeling in advance.