I don’t really know how to discuss The Beaver without getting into spoilers. I could offer the surface analysis of the film, but it’s not fair to all the things the film is.

So what are those things?

First, it’s a serious film about depression. It’s not a comedy. It’s not a charming reverie on depression, as is Lars & The Real Girl, which uses a very similar idea. And if you can’t get past the beaver itself, you can’t really take this journey.

Second, it’s a film about how families deal with depression. You have the mother, who is trying everything she can think of to support both her husband and her children through the husband’s depression… while also dealing with the guilt of knowing that she is giving more to the adult in her immediate world than she is to the children, who really need her more in a normal situation.

Third, it’s a satire about today’s culture. I found myself thinking more about Charlie Sheen, who has paraded his illness around, bouyed by the idea that people had accepted it, than Mel Gibson when watching the second act of this film. Success makes everyone forget/look away from the sometimes ugly road to that success.

While it is true that the thing that Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are most famous for is performing sex acts on “leaked” videos, we don’t linger in that reality every time we engage them. However mocking of them we might be, “I’ve seen that famous person get hit in the face with a penis” is not the central conversation every time they show up on our TV screen. Same with Roman Polanski, for that matter. My tendency to point out that he is a “child anal rapist” when he comes up in conversation seems to disturb people. And it can’t be because he isn’t one. Everyone is agreed that he is, even if you want to requalify his sex act on a quaaluded 14 year old as something other than rape. But to think that this is what defines him is too uncomfortable to deal with every time his name comes up… for most people.

In his “rotten” review of the film, Roger Ebert questions whether Matt Lauer would really do an interview with a puppet. But he doesn’t. That part of the movie reminded me completely of Tom Cruise. I was waiting for Mel Gibson to jump on someone’s couch! Lauer confronts Gibson’s character, much as he did Tom Cruise. He doesn’t address the puppet. And The Beaver makes its impassioned case. Matt Lauer takes mental illness seriously in the scene, but is beaten by the puppet, as the public prefers to live the fantasy for that moment.

Equally important, when Gibson does physical damage to himself to remove The Beaver from his life (see: Fight Club), the news of this has immediate results on his product line. The public’s thrill about the freak show of a grown man hiding behind The Beaver ends just as abruptly as it began when it gets real. We are complicit.

Getting back to the central character, Gibson’s performance would earn most actors an Oscar nomination. It is as subtle and nuanced and explosive a performance as we are likely to see this year. And the fact that he is in hiding, aside from that ridiculous interview that ran on Deadline, is a real shame… for him and everyone else involved with the film. This actor understands depression and he walks the line between protecting himself/his character and wanting to be understood… wanting to understand… brilliantly.

I do come into the film with baggage. I have a profoundly depressed parent, who has been that way since before my birth. I know what both of the sons in this story are going through because I went through it myself, at both ages. Our journeys were not the same. I was never as self-loathing as the older son, played in another tremendous performance by Anton Yelchin, and I was never given any of the hope that the younger son takes and has fulfilled on some level by The Beaver. I guess, as an adult, I have seen the story through Jodie Foster’s character’s eyes as well. At some point, I became conscious enough to see that element of the story reflected in my parents’ relationship.

My mother never found her Beaver or her Real Doll or her Tyler Durden. I guess that the happy fantasy of these films, for those of us who have lived with loved ones who have gone through this level of depression, is that, somehow, the person buried underneath it will find enough strength to unbury themselves. And if they need a hand puppet or a doll or a fight to do it, great. That would be so much better than loving someone who can never reach through the glass they live behind.

One of the things that is brilliant about the film and its screenplay by Kyle Killen is how the rest of it is layered into the main story. This is a really important movie for Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence, who gets to play a real girl for the first time in a significant turn in a major film. I’m sure some people were put off by the coincidence of a teen in a family with a secret and a girl from a family with a secret ending up in some kind of relationship. But like alcoholics and other “broken” people with a weight that drives their lives, these people find each other, not consciously, but inevitably. And the dance between these two teens is elegant and pitch perfect.

On his side of it, all he wants to do is to scream his truth as loud as he can… so he assumes that she wants the same thing. She doesn’t.. at least not that she knows. She has built all the devices in her life to present a perfect public face while hanging onto her pain in private. He has a ton of devices too, but they don’t wear as well on him, in part, I think, because he is still dealing with a living, breathing source of his pain and shame. Their relationship in this film is Diablo Cody with a philosophy PhD.

One of those great moments in the film that is easily overlooked, in part because Jodie Foster chooses not to hit us over the head with it, but also because there is so much going in in these lives, is when Lawrence’s “Norah” goes back to the scene of the crime and paints the wall with the emotional graffiti that she was meant to release… and then let’s Yelchin’s “Porter” know that she didn’t break the law… she canvassed the side of the building she painted with paper, which he could remove and take with him. She both changed and didn’t… she used her nimble mind, always finding a way to survive, to change the problem slightly, so she could do the right thing for her AND in the eyes of the law AND to make a gift of it for the person who pushed her to engage. It is the Kobayashi Maru of mental health. And there are small moments like that all over the film.

It is interesting to me that Roger Ebert didn’t like the film, as he was another person I thought of a lot while watching the movie. I am not an intimate of the man, but I know him a bit. And when he was pulled into his life-challenging situation, I have no idea how he felt or behaved in the midst of it. But I do know that when he stabilized, he did what Walter Black talks about in the film. He stopped. And he rebuilt. Roger being Roger, he didn’t abandon his loyalties. (When he is really with you, there is no more fierce a friend.) But it felt, from my side of the world, almost like he put his metaphoric arm to the sawblade and cut off the past so he could move into the future. And like Walter Black, he had a lot to bring with him. And now, he is Roger Ebert 2.0, who does not speak, but says more than he ever has to the public. He is a man who does not eat, but writes a cook book. He is less self-protective and more anxious to mix it up than he ever was before in his professional life.

It’s hard to know where Roger would be right now if he wasn’t forced to change his entire life… if Gene were still here and Roger could still speak… if Disney hadn’t pushed him hard enough to make him walk away with his thumbs. Would his life still be as much as it is now about nurturing others? Because that is what the TV show is, especially in all the guest segments. His love for his Far-Flung Correspondents is profound. Roger has become the most generous film critic in the world, by far. And while it’s true that no one else is quite in his position to create opportunity for others, there are still not many who would use that effort for others and not primarily in selfish pursuits. This is not to say that any man is capable of being without selfishness. And as his journey continues, he seems to look back less and less. His legacy stands… but his future is what matters now.

Roger, who was already fascinated and thrilled by the expanded world created by the internet before he got sick, truly rose from the ashes of a near-death experience to begin again. The old Roger would never have done that Esquire story the way Roger 2.0 did. But 2.0 did it and it has redefined the man, much as it crystallized his past.

So if you think The Beaver being so heavy and so pained before it finds salvation in release, and that this is artificial, you are countered by real life… as close as a thumb away.

But man, did I ever digress…

Lots has been made about The Beaver himself. What I haven’t seen written is what, in my eyes, becomes quite clear in third act. The Beaver is Walter Black/Gibson’s father, voice and all.

It is one of the odd things about the film that we really don’t get into why Walter is so deeply depressed. I think it is one of the things that throws people off about the film, even if they can’t quite figure out why they are so unable to settle into the story. But in that last part of the movie, the voice is unmistakably Walter’s unaccepting, unforgiving, unrelenting parent, who when lost, left Walter behind, unprepared, in function or emotion, to step into his shoes.

The argument that Walter has with The Beaver before they part ways seemed like it could have been lifted word for word from Fight Club, as Tyler Durden/Pitt warns Tyler Durden/Norton that the meek can’t live without the mighty. After their journey together, Norton’s character seeks the middle. Tyler Durden/Pitt is the man that Tyler Durden/Norton thinks he should be, but is so anesthetized by the culture that he can only change in a schizo panic. Walter Black has been, it seems, destroyed by his father. He does not believe he can succeed because he has been told that he is just an appendage… and so, becomes, in his depression, nothing other than that appendage. Ironically, The Beaver is his father as an appendage… and must be severed before Walter can take control of his life again, though it won’t be easy.

Frustratingly, this swings the focus back on Mr. Gibson’s real life and his domineering father. Gibson clearly has had the bravado to have great success in his career… but oh, that appendage… the anger, pain, and guilt of wanting to honor your father and also move past your father… no excuse for bad behavior, but an explanation, perhaps.

But I would rather stick to the movie and swing back to the Wizard of Oz metaphor… which is so much easier for everyone to swallow. Dorothy wants to be somewhere over the rainbow… but she always had the power… and there’s no place like home. Walter is Dorothy. The Beaver is The Wizard.

Of course, the child in the family sees both The Beaver and his father as an entity and doesn’t flinch. Movie cliche or the truth? Who is indicted by tossing it away cheaply? Not the movie. Us. Every person in this film has a real stake in the story. Of course, other choices could have been made, but would it have made the film better or just different… just easier for the person who wants it to change?

How much is going on, all at once, as Jennifer Lawrence’s character realizes what Yelchin’s character is really dealing with in his life? In just moments of on-screen time, she has to experience what someone she loves has been hiding, what her civilian reaction might be, how his truth reflects on her personal fears and what she’s been hiding, and what she wants to come next… and we get to see her process all of that, it felt like, 2 or 3 times in a virtual instant. Or we can just reduce it to “teen cliche’.”

The Beaver is the best American release I have seen this year… easily.

It frustrates me enormously to read reviews that suggest this film is too formulaic or simplistic. It is right there on the top of the list of films that generate great myopia in this country because they are in English and the players are too familiar. If this film was in French, it would be getting the best reviews of the year… and no distribution int the US… just a remake deal that would never get made.

This is not a perfect film. And I do know too much for my own good about the subject. But it is the kind of challenging piece that, as both of Foster’s other films have done, engaged the rules of movie format and broken them to some rather profound and even subversive ends. And maybe that is why she is so wildly underappreciated as a director. She’s not pretentious enough for the critics or accessible enough for audiences.

I’m not holding my breath for a Gibson nomination for Best Actor this winter. But it would be a real shame if Kyle Killen’s screenplay was not well into the running for awards at year’s end. I think this is one that will linger and eventually find the audience and respect it deserves.

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