HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS Makes Movies Silly Again

We don’t need more sex, but we do need more nonsense.

In theory, if you listen to the film critic hive mind, the problem with movies these days is that there isn’t enough sex. Mainstream theater fare tends towards action blockbusters for all ages, which means lots of beautiful bodies but not much in the way of horniness. Film aficionados long for the days when all that perfect flesh was engaged in fewer CGI stunts and more heavy breathing.

The thing is, though, that while blockbusters aren’t necessarily very sexy, it’s pretty easy to find heterosexual heterosexing (and for that matter homosexual homosexualing) on streaming, or even on the big screen a half step away from the blockbusters. Films like The Substance, Drive-Away Dolls, Blink Twice, Anora, Hit Man, and numerous others feature depictions of adult sexuality and sexual themes—including queer sexuality, sexual abuse, and other issues that were often not treated directly, or with much nuance, in the supposed golden age of sexy cinema past.

There is, then, no dearth of sex in current movies. But there is a lack of silliness.

There was a time when big studios and distributors invested in completely nonsensical absurdist romps like Airplane, The Naked Gun, and, for that matter, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Today, there are lots of humor films for various ages, from Inside Out 2, to Deadpool and Wolverine. But whether they’re innocuous or raunchy, these comedies today inevitably have a standard Hollywood moral; the main character overcomes a tragic backstory and feelings of inadequacy to learn important life lessons and achieve true empowerment. Nonsense is not enough; there has to be the usual boring story to ensure no boring normie is alienated. And since streaming films are often aimed at an older audience, they don’t necessarily pick up the silly slack.

Writer/director Mike Cheslik’s Hundreds of Beavers is a reminder of what we’re missing in our new overly sober era. The movie is about an applejack salesman Jean Kayak (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) whose orchard is destroyed by beavers. He’s forced to try to make a living in the depths of winter as a trapper.

As with the best of silly from Buster Keaton to Bugs Bunny, the narrative is just a chassis on which to hang a series of escalating (mostly wordless) gags: Jean running in place on a frozen lake; Jean being bombarded with poop from passing geese; Jean getting pecked in the face by an irate woodpecker; and of course Jean setting elaborate traps for beaver and rabbit and having them improbably backfire Wile E. Coyote style.

The slapstick is only improved by the film’s Pythonesque less-is-more approach to effects. The various animals are all just people in furry suits; combat choreography is delightfully hokey. And when really big set pieces are called for, the film shifts into clunky animation.

There’s a similarly lacksadaisacal approach to storytelling; gags are more important than consistency or logic, and the film cycles through genres as quickly as it piles up beaver pelts. Sherlock Holmes beaver investigates the beaver murders; there’s a beaver courtroom; a beaver James Bond sled scene; a pole dancing episode despite the sub zero temperatures. Why not? The point is to make you giggle, and exposition, or sequence, would just get in the way.

Jean does have an arc of sorts; he becomes a better, less drunk trapper and falls in love with a pelt skinner. But these nods to Hollywood melodrama are perfunctory; the film isn’t invested in them and doesn’t expect you to be.

On the contrary, one of the best parts of these kinds of nonsense romps is that they are not invested in Hollywood’s primary ideological default: main character syndrome. Nonsense movies don’t bother to try to convince you that the good guy is really good, because they don’t care, and in fact think it’s kind of funny that you’re supposed to give the protagonist a pass on violence, cruelty, and incompetence just because he’s the protagonist. Thus, The Naked Gun is one of the most anti cop films the mainstream has ever created, because the cartoonish cops are treated as bumbling uncaring fools. Similarly, Jean cheerfully slaughters his way through inoffensive woodland creatures, sets woods on fire, and cheerfully endangers more competent trappers (white and Native American.)

You’re not supposed to morally condemn Jean or anything; this is, again, a slapstick laff generator, not an ethical inquiry. But precisely because the movie cares about nonsense rather than morals, it’s able to treat the usual ethical presumptions of Hollywood as the nonsense they are. Silliness is fun because it’s fun, and also because a lot of our narrative conventions and default assumptions deserve to be mocked. Hundreds of Beavers is a lot of beavers. But when the movie’s over, you’ll still feel like there wasn’t enough.