I am not a doctor. So you should take what I’m about to say next with a grain of salt. As far as I know, not all depression comes from the same types of places. The most typical kind of depression I would think can be characterized as a lack of hope. This lack of hope can basically be about anything really and have many psychological or emotional causes. In that case, it should help the patient to have a happy family, a loving wife, and a decent job. Therapy, prayer, social interaction, and the like should have positive effects. A second type of depression is merely a symptom of some other type of physical disease, syndrome, or problem. The best examples I can think of are people with sleep apnea. One case involved this horribly depressed guy that no amount of therapy helped. Turned out he was such a loud snorer that he would consistently wake himself up at night. He hadn’t had a decent sleep in years. In his case horse tranquilizer would have been a better help than therapy ever could be. They performed surgery on his nose to fix the snoring problem and his depression vanished.
Now take the example of Walter Black, played in this movie by Mel Gibson. Walter Black used to be a successful businessman, a loving husband, and a good father to his two sons. Now all he wants to do is sleep. He still is the CEO of his toy company although due to his off performance it has been suffering in the stock price lately. His wife, played by Jodie Foster, still loves him but has just kicked him out of the house as a measure of last resort. Every type of therapy, self-help mantra, and pill has been tried to no effect. Keep in mind that his depression apparently preceded all the problems he now has in his life. Now, knowing all of that, which type of depression profile does Walter Black seem to fit? Does he sound like the type of person that has severe complex emotional and psychological problems or does he sound like he is simply utterly exhausted.
This movie is under the impression that Walter Black suffers from emotional problems. I admit that I don’t get it. I spent the entire movie wondering what exactly his problem could possibly be. The depression itself is never explained or given a cause. I’m just going to assume that the writer of this movie, Kyle Killen, got his inspiration from some very successful and brilliant person he knew that inexplicably fell into a depression. He must think that these things just sort of happen from time to time. (That’s life, alas.) That kind of attitude is a mistake I think because it can lead to some pretty wacky very unhelpful solutions not just in the movies but also in real life. A person suffering from physical depression can’t mentally “snap out of it,” because the problem isn’t a mental thing. No, sticking a beaver puppet on your hand and creating a new personality for yourself is not going to work. To this movie’s credit the beaver solution doesn’t work for the entire movie. However, I find it inexplicable that the beaver would work at all. There are several scenes in this movie where the practical aspects of a grown man wearing a beaver hand puppet with a cockney accent are glossed over to a shameful degree. The most distressing is when Walter Black shows up to work with it on and the beaver starts giving orders. Guess what? Nobody quits that very same day. I don’t find that very realistic. If Walter Black is suffering from neither physical depression (for which the beaver would not help) nor emotional depression (for which the comfort of his wife would be a much better solution), then he must be insane. Except he does not look or act like an insane person in the movie. In effect, the character as written and as Mel Gibson plays him doesn’t make sense. And that might be okay in a comedy, but it is fatal in a serious movie. I can’t have empathy for something I don’t understand. Then again, I’m no doctor.
Then there is this subplot involving his son. He has a business at school where for two hundred dollars he will write your paper and at the same time make it sound like you did it. Quite the skill, the novelty of which the movie takes for granted and never explores. One day the school valedictorian/head cheerleader, played by Jennifer Lawrence, who as I am writing this is 21, comes up to him and offers him $500 to write her commencement speech. She explains that even though she gets straight A’s, is the most popular girl in the school, and excels at everything she has ever done, she still has nothing to say. This is what I would refer to as a clever screenwriting technique that gives the lonely misunderstood emo boy an excuse to be needed by the most beautiful girl in the school. Anyway, even in the presence of such a character as Walter Black, she takes the gold medal for most unrealistic character in the movie. This comes to a head in one scene that seems to be constructed as a revelatory insight into the human condition but comes off as more of a cruel joke. It is revealed that this girl was arrested when she was in 8th grade for tagging, which is slang for graffiti. She hasn’t exercised her art in over four years. And then one night, inspired by a sort of “express yourself” cliché, she decides to take it up again. What she accomplishes in one night after four years of no practicing and apparently with only an 8th grade art education looks like something that would take an accomplished artist several weeks to do. She steps back and nonchalantly remarks that, “I guess I had a lot of things to say.” The art is very modern so its hard to understand what exactly she was trying to say, but I will take a guess that is something along the lines of a huge “F*** You” to every teenager who has ever picked up a pencil or paintbrush, tried art for the first time, and realized that it might actually take some time and practice to become good at it.
Again, these sorts of mistakes wouldn’t bother me in a broad comedy, but a movie that intends to be realistic about mental illness and teen angst can’t be allowed to get away with not knowing what it is talking about. These are serious issues after all. Here are some good movies that deal with depression that perhaps you should watch instead: Lars and the Real Girl, Punch-Drunk Love, and Fight Club. Those may seem to be odd choices but they are the best I have seen at portraying how being in a hopeless funk feels like. If you don’t think “Fight Club” is about depression than may I direct you to the scene where the imaginary friend gets so fed up with his real counterpart that he starts beating the living shit out of him. A similar thing happens with the beaver in this movie, but “Fight Club” did it better.
p.s. If you know someone who seems depressed because all they ever want to do is sleep, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that they are actually sleeping and not simply lying on a bed hoping to God they could go to sleep but finding themselves physically unable to. Sleep deprivation is a killer. It’s what interrogators use on prisoners to break them. At least 7 hours a night, people. Chances are you’ll feel better.
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