Depression is depression no matter what you try. Therapy, medication….it’s all the same. But certainly walking around town with a beaver puppet on your arm isn’t exactly the solution either. Jodie Foster directs and reteams with her friend Mel Gibson (they did Maverick in the 90s.) Now they star as a married couple trying to overcome the destruction of their marriage. Walter (Gibson), a father to two sons, was once a successful business man for a toy company whose shares are dropping and whose attitude has dropped to match it. His wife (Foster, at ease in any role she plays) thinks that it’s time to separate. Alone in a hotel room Walter has a drunken moment when he realizes he can change his life by living through an animated puppet. Okay, sure, maybe, anything’s possible in that moment. But then when he’s taking this very seriously, and in full cockney accent, his wife is asking, “What’s with the accent and the puppet?” His son Porter (Anton Yelchin) can’t stand his father – or the puppet – but the youngest child, the one being bullied in school, little Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) finds it charming. And for an estranged-about-to-be-divorced-dad, any link to his son even in the form of a talking beaver, is good. Let’s face it….there’s times in life we all wish we could use a third person or toy animal to be a go-between for our problems. Foster seems always drawn to these caretaker mother roles – Panic Room, Nell, Contact , The Brave One– always searching for answers at the risk of protecting loved ones or seeing justice is served. Walter’s mission…to wipe the slate clean and perform his own self-help. But he also talks of ending the pretending, yet it seems he’s pretending by needing this creature to act on his behalf. We watch his character go from suicidal to a newfound love of life, yet it’s all because of the puppet. So he never quite confronts his demons until the very end, at which point we’re already unattached to his character. Or his puppet. Gibson comes off as borderline creepy so it lacks the sincerity that indie film, Lars and the Real Girl had with Ryan Gosling as a young man who wanders around with a blow-up doll. Gibson’s performance is stellar but it’s a damn good plot you can’t quite sink your teeth into. No put intended. Two tiaras
