Thursday, June 30, 2011

The BEAVER

This is the story about a man and his struggle with depression. It is also about his family’s struggle with the effects of the illness which alienates him from work, from his wife and children, from himself and just about everything else in life.

What’s powerful about this story is that the wife deals with her lot in life with her eyes wide open – an ineffective husband, a preteen son victimized by school bullies and thrown into the dumpster, and a teenaged son who copes with banging his head against a hole in the wall, thinly camouflaged by a world map. She deals with her realities with the sanity at hand for the moment. She doesn’t have the compulsive need to resolve all her problems to get on with life, nor to prescribe to others the proper expressions for anger and frustrations, even when their personal problems become fodder for the headlines. She knows intrinsically what human limits are, and that it’s okay to fall and fail to keep up.

In the midst of the hullabaloo, they take a family portrait … picture perfect.

Herein lies what family portraits often conceal: shadows lurking behind the faces of hope. Everyone learns to keep their struggles private and separate from each other to keep up the façade of togetherness. In the end, no one is really connected to each other, and insidiously, even as more photos are taken, the rift widens.

Sadly, all the modernity and affluence of society does not do much to improve the human ability to deal with his fears and failings. Dysfunctions are re-labelled with medical-sounding terms such as “something-maniac”, while those with unhealthy coping behaviours to struggles common to man, find identification with groups that declare “we are born this way”. Even benevolence is a good cover-up where the compulsive desire to help others with their problems – even in the name of charity – gives a mastery and control over other people’s lives that are missing in one’s own.

I care little for what gutter journalism says about Mel Gibson, but when Jodie Foster and him collaborate, it is a movie I want to catch. This movie is dark, deep and because it’s also realistic, the proverbial light came at the end of the tunnel.