Is this a God dam?

HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS

2024

Directed by Mike Cheslik

Written by Ryland Tews and Mike Cheslik

Spoilers: moderate

Hundreds of Beavers has managed to make an outsized splash for what it is, and I suppose that means I've obliged myself to immediately answer the question, "so, what is that?"  In the most reductive sense, it's a super-indie comedy that resulted from the ferment of a couple of dudes and their circle, more-or-less dicking around in the Upper Midwest with movie cameras and prosumer visual effects programs while heavily under the influence of Canadian avant-garde film comedy as practiced by Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin (Maddin even got a "thanks" in both this one and their last one), which seems fair enough, since as Midwesterners they're practically Canadians anyway from my point-of-view as a Southerner,* and given the subject matter of the movie and only a few references to its location in the Wisconsin Territory, it virtually invites you to assume it could happen on either side of the Great Lakes.  Yet to be influenced by one thing is not by any means to be determined by it alone, and there's a lot of other glacial melt heading downstream here: the big stuff is the silent comedy of the 1920s (Keaton, Lloyd, and according to the Jack Davis-style poster, 1960s comedy ala 20s comedy aficionado, Dick Van Dyke) and the animated comedy of the 1950s (Jones, Freleng); there's also map-based adventure video games of the 1990s and 2000s, the movie sometimes coming close to being the let's play of its own 90s/00s map-based adventure video game adaptation; and there's a subtle but extremely palpable sensation of mid-2000s Internet sketch comedy, so I shall note here that I, myself, am not remotely comfortable describing Hundreds of Beavers as "avant-garde," even though it obviously is, and while I should stake right away that I actually quite like this movie, there's something unidentifiable about its attitude that just makes me a little itchy.

Or maybe it's not that unidentifiable: for even advancer in its guard (that is, in 2018), those two dudes—Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, the latter of whom I will offer the charity of assuming he adopted that name as a put-on—made Lake Michigan Monster, and Lake Michigan Monster shares enormous amounts of DNA with its younger sibling, only it came out all misshapen and wretched.  In fairness, lots of filmmakers improve on their second try (for the sake of accuracy, this is only their second feature), and I suppose I'd prefer to believe that it's not an accident that they did so.  For one thing, they traded off duties: Tews had been the credited director on Lake Michigan Monster, while both had co-written and Cheslik did sundries, particularly VFX and editing, but that's tantamount to "co-direction" on a project such as that movie or this one; so I don't even know if it means anything that Hundreds of Beavers finds Cheslik taking the sole directorial credit.  It's possible that we could "blame" Tews and "praise" Cheslik, but they're still both writing the film, and Tews is still the frontman, again taking the starring role.  The bigger thing, then, is that the "silent film" pastiche they'd determined to make, while nominal in some respects—it's very much a sound film, it's got sound all over—meant that they necessarily pulled back on all but a very few lines of verbalized dialogue, in favor of visual comedy and only vocalized reactions to that visual comedy.  This redounds in their favor for a couple of reasons: first, it largely closed off any access to the predominantly dialogue-driven comedy of Lake Michigan Monster, where most of the dialogue was founded on the idea that saying random stupid shit and putting it in an unserious, avowedly-fake movie was funny, which turned out to not be true and seemed abominably out-of-date even by 2018; second, by denying them the path of least resistance, it locked them into making something kind of like a real movie this time, so that the whole "mid-00s Internet sketch comedy" element I've described is now only a very faint vibe, felt mostly in the specific timing of the comedic editing choices, rather than something that swallows up the entire project like in Lake Michigan Monster, which was better than, say, Kickassia, but almost solely because its throwback black-and-white cinematography made for a surprisingly-accurate recreation of Filmgroup creature features from the 1950s.

And maybe what we have here is not quite a real movie, but in a way that asks you to root for it and find its bootstrapping charming, and I suppose I wouldn't have the heart to deny that I do root for it, and I do find it charming.  So: this is the tale of Jean Kayak (Tews), applejack distributor, whom we find on the last day that his applejack distillery remains a going concern, for after an animated prelude establishing Jean's applejack-making and binge-drinking bona fides that runs an Alice Comedy-like conceit through a somewhat unpleasant-looking Flash-style pop-up book, some beavers destroy his distillery and, incidentally, torch his apple field.  Jean only comes to what must be some months later, buried in the snow that now covers Wisconsin and has transformed its verdancy into a bleak white deathscape.  Jean slowly—very slowly—learns to survive in this wilderness, and eventually runs across the white fur trapper (Wes Tank), from whom he learns a new profession.  In the meantime, he's made an occasional ally of a local Indian (Luis Rico), and the commercial acquaintance of the merchant (Doug Mancheski), who would trade valuable gear to Jean for furs if he had any to provide, though the item Jean desires the most is his daughter (Olivia Graves), and she seems to return the affection, but to acquire the merchant's consent to their coupling Jean would need to bring to his trading post a great number of beaver pelts.  Hundreds.

Hundreds of Beavers confused me somewhat for a goodly while, because it takes the long way to get a scenario it's seemed to have already motivated in the first few minutes—Jean vs. the society of castorids—and my assumption, knowing more about what inspired its filmmakers and what it looked like than what it actually was, was that it was an eco-fable flipped on its head, with the human locked in environmental combat with a vast horde of rapacious rodents intent on destroying the landscape.  To some extent, it actually is that (although, in a way refreshingly, it must be one of the most "tame and obliterate nature for your own aggrandizement" movies made in decades), but not for a real long time, to the extent that the movie makes two big-laugh jokes out of its own weird-ass structure, not kicking off the opening credits of this "fur trapping photoplay" till the 33 minute mark, and leaving the giant literal ellipsis at the end of the sequence hanging until, I'm not sure, but I think past the hour mark, when it finally resolves into the damned title.  And so we do have some unusually visible act markers for a three-act plot, yet also a movie that operates more as a matter of a pair of phases, in service to a story that surely is exactly what a 1920s silent comedy would have used as its excuse to hang gag sequences off of, "here's a put-upon loser, he falls in love, and to win his fair maiden's hand, he has to do something stupidly impressive that will involve an extended, zany, and kinetic climax," in this case one revolving around fighting an unexpectedly advanced beaver civilization.

The 1920s version would probably be a little more straightforward, and there's the nagging feeling that Hundreds of Beavers' 108 minutes fits a little baggily upon its bones, even though very few individual beats are bad and the obvious places where you would start tightening wouldn't net you much, and, on top of that, the effect of the movie is such that it's resistant to being cut down at all: those two "phases" I mentioned are the real structural arrangement here, and the first absolutely depends on being long and repetitive, maybe even irritatingly repetitive, while the second is hard to pare down just because it's already much shorter and it's where all of the exciting madcappery happens so one would obviously be loath to lose any of it.  (Though there is a 90 second brawl with the beavers in a beaver bar that jams up the momentum so hard while it tries and fails to do a Tex Avery "fight in a northern saloon" in live-action that it's the one thing in the movie I think I might've actually been able to persuade Cheslik and Tews to cut.**  The beaver-related grand finale to the grand finale also fell pretty flat for me, unfortunately, but I am under no such illusions about that, because Cheslik and Tews are passionately in love with that image, and whatever else, the passionate ardor for these images, whether they always play or not, is something that keeps Hundreds of Beavers a real joy to watch.)

So that first phase is, in its way, more interesting—not necessarily "funnier," or "more entertaining," though it's both funny and entertaining, but "more interesting"—because its function is so thoroughly bound up in structure, and I almost wish the applejack prologue weren't here, because the movie really starts only once Jean pops his head out of the snow, as if being born.  He eventually winds up naked, but curiously by then he's become less afraid, because this phase is all about this lone man deposited unceremoniously and unaware into an inhospitable world which he slowly—again, extremely slowly—learns how to control through his native human ingenuity, which, even so, might be a little bit on the dim side.  Though the number of shots in this film that don't involve some measure of cheap, fakey compositing might be able to be counted on one hand (it rises to the level of "aesthetically justified" which doesn't entirely excuse the frequent failures of that aesthetic, and when we get an actual shot of an uncomposited landscape, you wonder what might have been with a real budget), the sheer starkness of the Wisconsin/Michigan-shot wintry setting, magnified by the black-and-white, and the loneliness of the story, begins to work as some sort of cartoon recapitulation of the ascent of man, and how we all dimly dragged ourselves to the top of the food chain and learned to exploit the resources and rules of the world through tense, sometimes-warm, often-transactional friendships with other humans, and some of the most unrelenting trial-and-error you'll ever see a comedy get up to.

Hence why it'd be real hard to tighten this up, when it depends on Jean having to make ten iterative mistakes to get to one good outcome—and sometimes just the exact same mistake, because Jean is not bright—for laughs that start to come more cumulatively than at any individual thing, though there are some great individual bits as he starves, goes mad, starves some more, and keeps failing to hunt down any juicy mammals and survives instead on fish, using his own blood as bait.  (The funniest stuff, in this phase, is how it actually isn't "silent": Tews makes some just lovely shrieking noises when he hurts himself.)  I realize I have not mentioned the dizziest thing about the movie, in the aggregate: the mammals are played by guys in mascot suits, bought in bulk from a Chinese distributor and lightly customized, principally with "Xs" on their eyes for when they die, such as on the raccoon that constitutes Jean's hat.  Another reason this first phase needs to be as long as it is is so that you can start feeling the same white-hot resentment that Jean must feel, so it's actually a hilarious relief when he actually does reach the requisite XP to start murdering these cagey little fucking bastards en masse, and even if Jean still has the capacity for nauseated disgust, it's funny to us when the animal he brings is skinned and butchered by his sociopathic girlfriend, becoming a pile of felt and cottonball "gore" but resulting in a nice new warm outfit for Jean.  It provides a solid narrative reason besides just being weird to not drop the title card till the third act.

So that's one of the oddball choices the movie makes, and I alluded to the other by reference to "requisite XP," and the other big structuring device is a sort of gamified storytelling scheme, more obvious in the frequent recourse to a world map (the trapper's bequeathed "trap line map"), to inventory screens, and to programmistic rules (X animal eats Y animal eats Z animal), as well as to the basic fact that Jean trades pelts for shiny new items that are useful solely in making him better at the pelt-collection game (I will take this opportunity to question how in the possible fuck that a club could cost three pelts, when the springloaded traps cost only two); but the whole thing operates under a form of video game logic, because it is, like I said, a story about how trial-and-error and observation eventually get you to a place where you've mastered the challenge, whereupon you can get up to some really serious showmanship, exulting in your own deep comprehension of the mechanics, itself something akin to the human drive to understand and control a confusing and hostile world.  (And he does, after all, have hundreds of pelts to collect, and that's just going to get tedious one at a time.)  The climax, for its part, has every intention of seeing how completely you can fuse "silent physical slapstick" into "an SNES platformer," and it makes that experiment more successful than I'd have dared guess, though I probably like the movie more when it is being a movie, and finding ways to stuff gags and weirdness into its intentionally-repetitive structure, patiently scaffolding out jokes that are funny—that are even jokes at all—because of that patient scaffolding out across time.  (There's way too many things to list, but the ever-dwindling number of the trapper's dogs is a great piece of "it's funny because it's telling the joke over and over," but it's laugh-out-loud funny because the dogs are playing poker, until the last one is condemned to playing solitaire.  Right before it, too, is eaten by the wolf.  Which, amongst other things, means Jean has to pull the sled.)

It looks like what it looks like: a stitched-together collage of elements that only very occasionally looks like an actual 1920s movie (the individual pieces of cinematography sometimes can), because 1920s movies weren't digitally assembled out of dozens of composited shots and weren't massaged with sometimes-enchanting and sometimes-extremely-ugly CGI effects; I, too, wish the wolves could've had more money thrown at them to make them good movie monsters.  I would not like to see too many films decide to look like this—It's sort of like the YouTuber equivalent of Rankin's nostalgia and theatricality—but there's a guileless energy that, combined with being funny, makes it seem fresh and exciting.  And, of course, sometimes it's being funny simply because it's just bursting with ideas and surrealism; I have not seen Cheslik or Tew avow a Monty Python influence, but you know that that's there, too.  (Consider the addling matter of beaver Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, beaver Watson, investigating all these mysterious beaver murders, funny on its own but practically an homage to Holy Grail.)  The big "reveal" has honestly been "set up" as well as anything in this loosey-goosey movie—the beavers' dam bears a pretty noticeable resemblance to a certain tower in a certain book of the Bible—but the concepts it starts spinning out in the finale amount to some wild, orthogonal stuff to the "plot" of the film, and even if I don't love every single idea that this big, burly finale spins out, the whirlwind of nonsense and movement is awfully loveable, anyway.

Score: 8/10

*It is a sign of the unprecedented madness of our times that this mild joke could be interpreted as politically fraught.

**Then again it might just be that it's graced with the least-effective strains of Chris Ryan's score, which is probably the least-effective thing in the movie, not per se bad, but it can get tiresomely repetitive.