Before I went to see The Beaver, Jodie Foster’s tragicomic fable about a suicidal man who finds temporary salvation by communicating with the world through a Cockney-accented hand puppet, I felt nothing but sympathy for its screenwriter, Kyle Killen. Killen’s highly touted script spent years in development hell: At various times Jim Carrey and Steve Carell were attached to star, and in 2008 The Beaver topped the so-called Black List, an inside-Hollywood ranking of the best screenplays that then languished unproduced. Finally, in 2009, Foster took charge of the project, and cast her close friend Mel Gibson in the lead. For the long-suffering Killen, this combination must have been a dream come true — right up until the moment when, just months after The Beaver’s shooting wrapped, Gibson’s viciously profane phone calls to his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, were leaked to the press.
Since then, the only buzz around The Beaver has been the sound of scandal and self-destruction. While Gibson and Grigorieva fought things out in court, the film’s release date was pushed back and back and back, presumably in the hopes that moviegoers would eventually forget how its star sounded telling the mother of his child that she deserved to be gang-raped, among other fond endearments. Judging by The Beaver’s initial box office, that hope seems to have been a vain one. Gibson’s career may get resuscitated someday, but his first attempt at public rehabilitation looks dead on arrival.
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