The Beaver (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Jodie Foster. Starring Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Anton Yelchin.
A depressed corporate CEO (Mel Gibson) finds a beaver puppet in the trash and latches onto it as his sole means of interacting with the world. This includes his wife (director Jodie Foster), who struggles with conflicting feelings between her husband's revitalized charm and his growing craziness.
It's sort of a metaphor for how we all feel about Mel Gibson.
If you think this sounds like a really bad comedy, you would be wrong-it's actually a really bad drama. A dead serious drama, with any relief that might have come from the absurdity of the premise bulldozed over by Jodie Foster's utterly humorless direction.
So what deeper themes are explored by a weepy tragedy heavily featuring a stuffed rodent? The movie has nothing in particular to say about mental illness or coping with depression, as you might think it would. It's almost exclusively about family issues, ranging from the eye-rollingly mundane ("My son's been arrested for painting graffiti!") to the unrecognizably outlandish ("My husband's mind is being controlled by an evil beaver puppet!"). There is nothing in between. Both in front of the camera and behind it, Foster sobs through it all with the same glassy-eyed earnestness, the same lingering shots and somber piano notes.
If this had been a comedy, Gibson's character would have been driven to success by the puppet only to lose it in a shocking twist and finally pull through on his own merits. As a drama, the film must take a somewhat darker turn, but the hysterical climax it eventually reaches is more mean-spirited and appalling than anything I could have expected.
Whatever their other failings, there have never been a more talented pair of A-list actors than Foster and Gibson. But here, their gold-polished performances serve only as a reminder that things could have been even worse.
Rated PG-13 for Mel Gibson's innermost non-Jew-related thoughts.
2.5 out of 5
Dexter: The Complete Fifth Season (TV Series) - Starring Michael C. Hall, Jennifer Carpenter, Julia Stiles.
Dexter wears thin in its slow-paced fifth season.
For a show daring enough out of the gate to cast a sympathetic serial killer in the lead role, Dexter has grown surprisingly conservative about taking chances and pushing its boundaries. It seems like every new story arc is a slight variation on a past season's topic, and never has that been more true than in season five. This time, the writers combine the old questions of "What if Dexter had a girlfriend?" and "What if Dexter knew a crazy chick he couldn't get rid of?" and "What if Dexter had a friend who also liked killing people?" into one monstrous chimera named Julia Stiles.
The season opener is among the best episodes the show has done. It's a high-tension introduction that shows the writers intend to follow through on the full consequences of last season's cliffhanger, not just weasel out of them.
But almost immediately afterward they do weasel out, and spend the next five or so episodes running out the clock until the dash to the end begins. The heat on Dexter is turned down to a barely-noticeable warmth, like urine in a swimming pool. Another evil serial killer plotline is introduced-two of them, in fact, bringing the series total to somewhere around eight. It's a wonder there's anyone still left alive in Miami.
Keeping with the trend of recent seasons, the show does pick up the pace at around the halfway point, and the tedium evaporates for good. But there is no excuse for a show with only 12 episodes per season to waste so much screen time. If anything, they should be frantically trying to fit everything in.
The final episode-another "rescue the girl from the maniac" adventure-chickens out on a prime opportunity to shake things up as the previous season finale did. Incredibly, just one year after boldly shattering one of the premise's foundational supports, the showrunners have managed to reinstate the status quo.
Dexter remains entertaining in its better moments, but the series appears to have bled out.
3 out of 5
