"Hundreds of Beavers"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

It's a depressing, distressing time for the movie industry, and it's easy to lose heart. But if we can't turn to Hollywood studios and ubiquitous streamers for the answer, maybe few intrepid filmmakers in the frozen wilderness of Wisconsin hold the answer to how to bring back some of the magic of the movies.

Hundreds of Beavers does not follow the model of a Hollywood blockbuster. If there are three acts, I'm not sure what they are; if the main character has a deep and yearning need it's only to figure out what the hell is happening to him; and there's not much in the way of dialogue. It's mostly a silent movie, shot in grainy black and white, and looks like it was stitched together on someone's MacBook. Those are attributes. They're features, not bugs of this silly and subversive slapstick comedy.

Hundreds of Beavers seems inspired as much by the great silent comedies as by a video game, as it drops viewers into a surreal setting in which there appears to be nothing much like rules, plot or even a point. Give it time. It will all make sense. Or, more to the point, it will all make absolutely no sense, but there's an incredibly good chance you will find that sense is the last thing Hundreds of Beavers needs.

An actor with the unlikely name Ryland Erickson Cole Tews plays a man named Jean Kayak, who begins as a drunkard obsessed with applejack who, in a turn of events that cannot and should not be explained, ends up alone and freezing in a snowy wilderness. He needs to survive. The forest creatures around him, especially the beavers and the wolves, have other plans for him.

None of this is intended to bear any resemblance to reality, especially those creatures, who are played by performers in human-sized mascot suits. As he tries to find a tasty critter or two to eat, Jean Kayak stumbles upon a master trapper who looks like Santa with a sleigh pulled by human-sized, poker-playing dogs, and learns about a fur trader with a winsome daughter.

Hundreds of Beavers is pure slapstick. The applejack drunkard becomes a fur trapper, intent on waging war with the denizens of the snow-covered forest, who aren't as dumb (or as sweet and cute) as they appear. Jean Kayak becomes Wile E. Coyote chasing after untold numbers of Road Runners. And those beavers ... well, they have something even grander in mind.

Judging by the audience I saw it with, Hundreds of Beavers will bemuse you with its entirely unpredictable antics, or possibly drive you absolutely mad with laughter. Some people in the audience seemed ready to laugh to death like those weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Even those who seemed unsure what to make of it couldn't help be drawn in to its weird, wild, wonderful world in which reality dares not intrude. It's as completely imagined as the most advanced CGI landscape, with none of the polished perfection. And in that, it succeeds even better than any big-screen blockbuster.

By the time Jean Kayak finds himself being chased by those literal hundreds of beavers (study the movie's poster if you want some wacky clues to what's in store), this movie, made at a reported cost of $150,000, will have convinced you that the future of movies can be a happy, inventive, and daring one. Isn't it wild what beavers can teach us?

Viewed April 14, 2024 — Laemmle NoHo

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