Review of The Beaver (2011) by Shiira — 10 Jun 2011

"You take everyone's suffering and turn it into gold," Lucy complains to her misanthropic brother-in-law, a Phillip Roth-like novelist in Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry", and it goes without saying that it's Allen who plays the unscrupulous writer.

If read as a coded apology to his former lover, the line then becomes tantamount to a mea culpa, since in real life, as Allen's fans know, his films often contain autobiographical elements, none more so than "Husbands & Wives", the 1992 psychodrama that arrived in theaters on the heels of the Soon-Yi scandal, in which ardent Woody-philes lined up to go watch their hero work out his relationship issues in a diegesis fraught with transparency, unbeknownst to Mia Farrow, the filmmaker's live-in lover, whose adopted daughter he started sleeping with.

Farrow's situation was unprecedented and unenviable, a celluloidal public humiliation perpetuated by Allen in a film where he lies self-referentially toward questions pertaining to fidelity. Playing Gabe to Farrow's Judy, the literature professor tells the wife that his young female students "don't want an old man.

" Attracted to what a friend describes as "kamikaze women"(a reference to Previn's Asian background), Gabe Roth pursues a younger woman, a promising student writer(played by Juliette Lewis), who in a self-revelatory scene at a taxi dispatch office, is seen retrieving a lost manuscript alongside Allen through tinted glass with an ominous "Beware of the Dog" sign pointedly hanging out front, as a sort of stealth warning to Farrow about his unforgivable betrayal that would soon be coming to light.

In "Bullets Over Broadway", Allen fatuously declares that "an artist creates his own moral universe." Three years later, the amoralist, in a more humble and contrite mode, as Harry Block, admits that he "can't function well in life but can in art," words which never rang truer for Mel Gibson, who during production on "The Beaver", exercised his right as an artist to create his own circle of hell.

Same as the Allen film, the appeal of this curio by the former Clarice Sterling lies in its baggage, which in this case, comes in the form of those infamous phone calls that a very drunk Gibson placed to his Russian girlfriend, which in turn, transforms ordinary scenes into confessional performance art, such as the one where Walter Black, using the dissociate hand puppet to perform an intervention on himself, given the context of his personal life, becomes a real self-introspective moment, therefore blurring the line between drama and documentary.

When the beaver tells the depressed CEO of a successful toy company to "blow up" his life and "start again", he might as well be talking to Gibson himself, who apparently took the hand puppet's advice as motivation to blow up at Grigorieva over a series of menacing wireless exchanges; at one point telling the mother of his child that if she "gets raped by a pack of n******, it's your fault.

" Is it possible that the actor, under the influence of alcohol and, perhaps, the devil, could no longer make the distinction between where make-believe ended and real life began? When Gibson assaulted Grigorieva in their home(alluded to in the tapes where he hits the accomplished pianist in the face while holding Gibson's child), it's as if he was following the beaver's instructions to "blow up the whole bloody building.

" And yet, in spite of the tapes, people still tolerate him, boorish behavior and whatnot, as evidenced by he hero's welcome he received at the most-recent Cannes Film Festival where "The Beaver" had its world premiere.

If you're a celebrity, or a person with the clout to wield power, like Gibson's counterpart Walter Black, the face of a multi-million corporation, you can get away with murder, or the considerably lesser crime of addressing your employees in tandem with a movable piece of anthropomorphic fabric.

Surrendering control to the beaver, Walter's alter-ego, who carries "the negative aspects of his personality", rescues the slumping toy manufacturer by rolling out the improbably popular "Mr.

Beaver's Woodcutting Kit", a product that has the metaphorical possibilities of being the Gibson-directed fluke hit "The Passion of the Christ". After all, the toy comes complete with a hammer(present during the crucifixion scene) and a chisel, which when used in concert with the hammer on the kit-supplied block of wood, a child could then produce a cross.

"The Beaver", when all is said and done, allows Gibson to skirt personal responsibility and blame the reviled film and his domestic violence tendencies against women on a doppleganger. As an apology of sorts for all his past transgressions, in typical Gibson style, Walter tortures himself, cutting off his own hand with a bandsaw.

The real Mel Gibson didn't call his girlfriend a c*** and a w****, or blame the Jews for killing Christ. That was the puppet talking.