A Film Canon

Sometimes a film syncs so beautifully with an actor's personal life that it's impossible to believe it could have been any other way - and yet Mel Gibson wasn't the first choice for the role of Walter Black, a chronically depressed toy manufacturer who brings himself back from the brink of suicide with the aid of a talking beaver puppet. Nevertheless, only Gibson's back story could have prevented the film feeling gimmicky, let alone transformed it into something so beautiful. By the same token, only a friend could have directed Gibson by this point in his career - so there's something poignant about the fact of the film itself, about the slippage between Jodie Foster and Gibson's friendship, and their performance of a romance, that encapsulates their dual existence on the peripheries of Hollywood sexual orthodoxy, in a similar manner to Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester in Bride Of Frankenstein. It's a diegetic cusp, a position between two types of utterance, that cries out for exactly the acting-directing that Foster provides, so it's appropriate that the film should understand what could have been a fairly straightforward narrative of paternal failure and redemption as a failure of utterance, an inability to completely inhabit language. Given that Gibson's last incursion into the popular consciousness was as a psychotic voice - or, rather, as a psychotic presence so monstrous that it had distilled itself into a disembodied voice - it's even more appropriate that Walter is presented as a burnt-out voice, a place where some unnamed crisis that precedes and looms over the narrative has prevented language. It's a symptom that extends, in turn, to his entire family - his wife (Foster) uses the dinner table as a desperate attempt to restore conversation, his older son eschews his own voice, writing speeches and exams for other students, and his younger son has difficulties talking to people at all. From this perspective, the beaver's ability to restore paternal authority is synonymous with its ability to restore language - first and foremost to Walter, and then only indirectly to his family. Just as Gibson's beliefs can be traced back to his even more extremist father, so the beaver intervenes at the precise moment at which Walter is about to follow in his father's footsteps, producing the film's central meta-narrative of Gibson fathering Walter, or Walter's final apotheosis as the destination of Gibson's rants and rambles. As a result, Gibson's most tangible presence in the film is as the beaver - the distant, commonwealth fringes of his American accent - while the rest of Walter's body is strangely unfamiliar, Gibson without Gibson. It's probably Foster's best direction, treading the fine line between horror and comedy that culminates with Walter's self-castration, and opening up a roller-coaster sentimentality that's strangely moving, if only because it encapsulates the epic, roller-coasting linguistic ambitions that each member of the family secretly harbors. In the end, these find their most evocative image outside the family, in the older son's girlfriend, whose graffiti auteurism provokes melancholy dreams of "tagging big and fast...on freeways, billboards, buildings... as if I'm running a million miles an hour."