Movie Box Review

It's anyone's guess why Francis Ford Coppola, at the age of 72, with some enduring cinema classics to his name, would decide to make a movie that's a cross between a David Lynch retread, an old horror cheapie, and a hallucination.  What matters is that the resulting TWIXT is utterly dreadful, the worst film this great director has ever created.

Before the Toronto screening, Coppola said that Twixt is based on a dream he'd had--always a danger sign in itself--from which he'd been woken before reaching the ending.  He's duplicated this all too literally in the film:  hero Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) is a third-rate horror novelist determined to dream his next book, but he keeps waking up before reaching the ending.  Baltimore is in the small, menacing town of Swan Valley, flogging his latest novel, when he runs into any number of idiotic and senseless incidents.  A teenager has been killed with a stake in her heart; another (ghost? vampire?) young girl (Elle Fanning) wants to chat; there's a (witch? vampire?) motorcycle gang on the other side of the lake; the crazy sheriff (Bruce Dern) wants to collaborate on a book; and the very talkative ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) is hanging around.  Don't expect any of it to make sense.

Coppola is all over the place here.  He's using music video gimmicks from the 1990s (oooh, black and white with just a chosen few colors in the image!), revisiting Rumble Fish, doing goofs on Apocalypse Now (Kilmer, himself approaching Brando-esque proportions, does a Colonel Kurtz bit when he has writer's block), throwing 3D into a couple of sequences.  The picture seems like a joke, but then Kilmer delivers a highly emotional speech about the death of his child in a boating accident, and one remembers that Coppola's own son died in just such an accident in 1986.  The whole movie makes you wince.

It's impossible to evaluate the acting, because since it's never clear just what Coppola has in mind, one can't tell whether the rampant over-emoting is justified or not.  (The one exception is Fanning, who remains an arresting screen presence even in this farrago.)  Mihai Malaimare Jr, who's been shooting all Coppola's recent films, keeps everything looking low-budget and cruddy--but maybe that was the intention.  Ditto the disjointed editing by Robert Schafer.

Coppola's sort-of comeback, after 10 years of inactivity, is a mystifying one.  Youth Without Youth was a mess, but at least it was a beautiful one; Tetro seemed to be finding its way to something more dramatically compelling.  Twixt, though, would be laughed off a Midnight Madness screen, much less serving as a festival Special Presentation.  Some master filmmakers--Bunuel, Bergman, Kurosawa, recently Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood--retain and even enhance their skills late in their careers. Others, like Billy Wilder, are sad remnants of their old selves.  It's beginning to look, tragically, as though Francis Coppola may be one of the latter.

As you may have heard, the new comedy-drama THE BEAVER stars a guy named Mel Gibson, who used to be a big-time movie star.  (It's actually a surprise to realize how long ago that was:  his last real hit was Signs, 9 years ago--to put it in perspective, that was also the year of My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Star Wars:  Attack of the Clones.)  He followed that in 2004 with a massive, if controversial, success as director of The Passion Of the Christ, after which he steered his career, and his life, straight off a cliff (he became Charlie Sheen + heinousness).  The Beaver is his first step at an attempted comeback, and however disgusting one may find his off-screen behavior, it has to be admitted that while Beaver mostly fails as a movie, that's not Gibson's fault.  He gives a strong, even brave performance that ultimately the film can't match.

For those who've managed to avoid the extended hype (the film, which had been screening more than a year ago, was repeatedly held back from release as its studio, Summit, tried to deal with Gibson's deepening calamities):  The Beaver features one of the more oddball concepts of recent years.  Kyle Killen's script presents us with Walter Black (Gibson), a family man and business owner who is stuck in a profound, probably clinical, depression.  Nothing can bring him out of it... until he places a beaver puppet over his hand, and begins communicating strictly through the voice, and as the persona, of the beaver.  This causes the consternation you'd expect from his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed) and children (Anton Yelchin and Riley Thomas Stewart) and the colleagues at his toy factory, but brandishing his new beaver identity, Walter becomes dynamic and successful, at least for a while. 

It's frankly impossible to watch Mel Gibson play a man with mental problems, alternately sunk in lethargic depression and then manic with the persona of his hand-puppet, without thinking of his real life instability.  Gibson seems to be going very deep in plumbing the self-disgust and desperation of Walter; only he (and maybe Foster) know how much of Walter is his own direct psychodrama, but the fact is that it all works for the character.  Walking around with a ratty puppet on his hand, Gibson constantly skirts the border of silliness, yet you never see him play for the easy laugh or step outside the man's disorder.  (It's weirdly unexplained, though, why this American character would give his new persona a Cockney accent--somewhat amusingly, the beaver sounds like a cross between Ray Winstone and early Michael Caine). 

Everything beyond Gibson's performance is shaky.  The tone of Killen's script is all over the place:  it starts out as more or less a comedy, then it gets extremely dark as Walter's family begins to implode and he becomes almost possessed by the beaver puppet (it starts to turn into every ventriloquist horror movie you've ever seen), and then it resolves itself into a standard we're-gonna-get-through-this therapeutic family story.  It may be that another director more comfortable with the surreal could have handled these hairpin turns, but Foster isn't that kind of filmmaker.  As a director (her previous films were Little Man Tate and Home For the Holidays), she has a penchant for dysfunctional family dramas and a very straightforward, undistinctive style, which doesn't serve this quirky material well; it's a tale that could have used some visual or aural pizzazz, and Foster doesn't seem interested in that side of filmmaking (unlike, ironically, Gibson himself).  She doesn't bring out the best of herself as an actress, either--her character is never more than the "wife," supportive and puzzled.  She gets better work from Anton Yelchin as the troubled older son, and the luminous Jennifer Lawrence, almost unrecognizable from Winter's Bone, playing a cheerleader with her own troubles who becomes involved with Yelchin. 

Artistically, The Beaver is a risk that doesn't pay off, except in Gibson's performance--which probably makes it a bad test of his post-scandal commercial viability.  Summit is taking it slowly, opening this weekend in only 20 theatres and hoping for critical support as well as a bounce from a Cannes Film Festival screening, before expanding on May 20.  One can't really root for the man--he should have tried speaking through a puppet in real life, rather than revealing his true self--but that doesn't negate his talent.

(THE BEAVER - Summit - 92 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Jodie Foster - Script:  Kyle Killen - Cast:  Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin, Jennifer Lawrence, Cherry Jones - 20 Theatres May 6/Expansion May 20)