Mel's Big Screen Midlife Meltdown

After having previously taken on Charlie Sheen and Donald Trump in the past several weeks, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I tackled Mel Gibson.  The onetime prince of political incorrectness (for his drunken anti-Semitic comments) returns to the screen this week in a movie directed by Jodie Foster, playing a man with clear substance abuse and mental health problems.  (It might also be noted that the actor who plays Gibson's elder son in the film is Jewish in real life.)

Whether one is in the mood to forgive and forget is up to each of you dear readers to decide for yourselves. (A Vietnam veteran whom I don't know personally but who lives in my neighborhood had a car with a bumper sticker that succinctly proclaimed, "We'll forgive Jane Fonda, as soon as the Jews forgive Hitler.")  But as with (the more talented) Fonda, if you take the absolutist's position, you risk missing what is perhaps Gibson's finest (though not most definitive -- he'll always be Mad Max) screen performance, in Jodie Foster's new directorial dramedy of upscale suburban desperation (in which she also co-stars), The Beaver, which boasts a great script by young veteran TV showrunner Kyle Killen.

Also opening this week, and largely covering the same ground, is dolt-comedy stalwart Will Ferrell, also playing a dejected and rejected desperate husband, in Everything Must Go.  In his most similar previous performance, 2006's Stranger Than Fiction (written and directed by that estimable young imagineer Zach Helm), Ferrell was a real man helpless against the psychic control of a cruel novelist who was managing his fate as if he were a character in one of her books.  In this one, he may have more direct control of his life and surroundings, but he certainly doesn't feel like he does.  His fed-up wife (an alcoholic now trying to recover) has left him, throwing his stuff out onto the lawn with the locks changed; his company car is repossessed; and his job is downsized after one too many complaints of inappropriate (and perhaps drunken) behavior.

Frustrated and angry, he spends the week (with a permit for a week-long "garage sale" granted by his police sergeant AA-sponsor) living in his yard, sleeping on the outdoor Barcalounger, showering with the garden hose, and taking care of #1 (if not #2, mercifully) in what used to be his and his wife's childless backyard koi pond (which in turn was once simply their pool.)  With nothing but time on his hands, he starts to take an interest in his neighbors, mentoring a preteen latchkey kid whose single mom is working as a registered nurse for a terminally ill old woman, which takes up most of her time.  Ferrell's lonely desperation is such that he even tries to reconnect with his old high-school sweetheart (a Laura Dern cameo), and can't decide whether to make a play for the neglected new neighbor who's just moved in, with an absentee husband whom he realizes bears all too much resemblance to himself.

In The Beaver (which is the superior of the two pictures), Gibson plays the CEO of a mid-sized toy company who is dealing with chronic and severe depression, and has been for years.  It's not that any one thing caused it; he just seems to feel that life has run out of gas, although his otherwise admirable, empathetic, and brilliant eldest son (Anton Yelchin) clearly hates him.  (Is it because he thinks his dad is sad, ungrateful, and pathetic?  Is it because he's afraid he's fated to turn into his father?  Answer: "all of the above.")   Gibson finally tries (and comically fails) to commit suicide after having rented a hotel room with various flotsam and jetsam that he'd cleared out of his house with, including an old plushie hand puppet -- The Beaver.  While recovering from the attempt, he starts to talk to himself as The Beaver, in a Cockney/Aussie half-breed accent, using the puppet as a way of addressing himself -- and soon, everyone else.

He returns home, zeroing in on his younger son (who still idolizes him) with the cute puppet, and begins using The Beaver as a way of communicating with his family while keeping them at bay, to the amusement of the younger son and the horror of his eldest.  But things are still just too touchy, there's too much baggage to do anything more.  Considering that the "naughty", tell-it-like-it-is Beaver has seemed to improve Gibson's demeanor by 'alf, his good-hearted wife (Foster) goes along with the stunt at first, bemused and willing to try anything to hold their family together.  And as a bonus, The Beaver gives Gibson an idea for a Bob-the-Builder-like toy line that becomes the hit of the year, to the delight of his loyal second-in-command at the toy company (the always-great Cherry Jones.)

So far, all seems well, except for his elder son, who stays as far away from his dysfunctional home as he can, spending time with a hot (and brainy) cheerleader girl who has some family issues of her own, and wants him to write her valedictory speech for their upcoming graduation.  Although this movie is Gibson's tour-de-force (with strong, nuanced, and dignified support by Foster), it is Anton Yelchin who really gives the movie the compass for its heart and soul.  Likewise, while Everything Must Go is essentially a one-man show for Will Ferrell (with its TV-movie cinematography and low budget, it could just as well have been done on stage), Christopher Jordan Wallace (son of the late gangsta rap legend The Notorious B.I.G.) is magnificent as the lonely but whip-smart, completely un-cliched African-American tween with a flair for polite salesmanship, who gives Ferrell some light in his unplugged life.

In the hands of say, Seth Rogen or the Wayans brothers, the "high concept" of a man losing his grip who communicates via a cutesy hand puppet could've been made into a comedy so broad and vulgar, it would make Tyler Perry's "Madea" look like a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.  The Beaver certainly has its share of laughs and awkward moments, but it is explicitly about mental illness, as Gibson's Beaver morphs from becoming a temporary stopgap in helping him regain his perspective into yet another alcohol/drug-like "crutch" to depend on and hide behind.  The Beaver may start off cute and charming, but it doesn't end that way, and largely and thankfully avoids the predictable sitcom clichés or The Office-style frustration-comedy setups.  (I won't spoil the climax, except to say it manages to be shocking without being totally nihilistic or in-your-face depressing.)

Some years ago while still a teenager, my grandparents gave me a mini "encyclopedia of film" book which had, among other things, a chapter on the Airport / Poseidon Adventure / Towering Inferno phase of star-studded "disaster" exploitation movies.  While producer Irwin Allen was the "master of disaster", the British critic who wrote the book said "I blame President Nixon!" for the Watergate-era genre's success.   Just after that, the first generation of "slasher" horror films made their appearance, along with small-screen sisters like Charlie's Angels -- all featuring attractive, sexually active young people being even more horrifically and sadistically killed, right when they were starting out in life.  Could it be just a coincidence that this was precisely when Presidents like Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford prescribed belt-tightening and "lowered expectations", pointing the finger at defenseless working-class whites and 'uppity' minorities for their "materialism", instead of being grateful little Oliver Twists?

In much the same sense, what I was struck by in watching both of these films was how distinctly they represented the zeitgeist of Obama-era America -- if not quite as definitively as the standard-setting em>Up in the Air,< still close enough.  They don't offer "hopey-changey" cotton candy optimism, but they represent a different kind of hope, which seems far closer to the truth of post-meltdown society -- a fingers-crossed, things-are-awful-but-maybe-we'll-get-through-this hope of people trying to get by, one day at a time.  What sets today apart from the era of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush is that, even as infantilized as our political expression has become, we can no longer ignore or paper over the world around us as it closes in.  Both of these movies are about people trying desperately to hold on to what they've got -- just as we do every day with our dwindling savings, our maxed-out credit cards, our about-to-foreclose equity lines, our jobs at supposedly "secure", established companies like (say) Maytag, Merrill-Lynch, Borders, Blockbuster, and so on.

And sometimes, no matter how strong our grip is on what keeps our senses of security secure, the strength of exigency and circumstance can be even stronger.  Like someone standing outside the ICU with grandma or grandpa on the respirator, no matter how much we might want to keep holding on or how much it hurts, sometimes we just have to force ourselves to let go.  So long old house, farewell manufacturing plant, aur revoir old way of life.  Life is forcing many of us to say an unwilling "goodbye to all that."  (It's also worth noting that the kids in these movies -- Yelchin and his girlfriend in The Beaver, Wallace in Everything Must Go, are in many ways more mature than the adults.  If that isn't a signpost for the era of Mark Zuckerberg and Ezra Klein, where 25-year-olds are rebooting centuries-old formats for newspapers and book publishing and politics, I don't know what is).

The image of a man sitting immovably in the front yard in his recliner after being put out of his house is the definitive shorthand for both these films.  It is equal parts pathetic and defiant, admirable and sickening.  We may never thrive the way we used to, or feel as breezily secure as we once did.  Yet in the end, these movies do give us hope -- not reassurance, not Joan Crawford movie or Little Orphan Annie "sun'll come out tomorrow" optimism -- but just enough hope to think that maybe, even as grim as things are (as that great philosopher Gloria Gaynor would say), we will survive.

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