Would You Survive HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS?
One man. One rifle. Hundreds of beavers
I have fond memories of childhood summers spent in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, and enjoy the fact that pretty much every lodge and gift shop is a floor-to-ceiling monument of corpses. Restaurants, too: there’s something primal, almost ceremonial, about eating a fried meal while the cloudy glass eyes of bobcat, deer, and jackelope survey you from above. The shared glow, the ritualization of caloric transfer from one life form to another — the Northwoods cabin/Bass Pro Shops aesthetic is the hunter/trapper lifestyle reconjured in microcosm. It recalls a deep, unpretentious, almost spiritual affinity between humanity and wildlife: we are all stores of fat and fur and nutrients, fellow skitterers to the grave.
Humanity, thanks to industrialized agriculture and the highway, now possesses the upper hand. But underneath it all, one sometimes senses a vague, sublimated longing to return to more survivalist times. Plexiglass Paul Bunyans and the Giant Musky dot the landscape, standing in shared reverence to older struggles of brute force and survival. On the radio, Gordon Lightfoot reminds us that even the sunny Great Lakes are biding their time to kill us. And this year we have Hundreds of Beavers, a two-hour slapstick tour de force that gleefully revives the hairy, primordial struggle of the old Midwest. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville chronicled the “universal cannibalism of the sea”; Hundreds of Beavers brings us, at last, the universal cannibalism of Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I don’t think I’ve ever come out of a movie screaming at so many people to see it. Hundreds of Beavers is a conversion experience; I finally understand friends who describe sprinting out of Reservoir Dogs in the 90s or Napoleon Dynamite in the 00s and grabbing people by the shoulders to evangelize about it. So listen! Look at me! There’s this guy! And he just — he has to kill hundreds of beavers.
For one thing, it’s worth seeing simply because it looks unlike anything else on screens now. Imagine if The Revenant was directed by Buster Keaton. Or if Fritz Lang had made, like, YouTube Poops? The beavers are played by humans in beaver costumes, and there are more than 1500 effects shots (also by director Mike Cheslik), with a handmade quality that recalls silent film-crafters like Georges Méliès but also late-aughts Internet videos. There is no dialogue: characters communicate in a myriad of grunts, whimpers, and screams.
From a distance, the plot is simple: frontiersman “Jean Kayak” (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) is an applejack seller, until highly intelligent beavers gnaw down his stills and leave him stranded, pretty much naked, in the deadly Northwoods winter. To survive, Kayak must embark on a Jack-London-type quest: learn the ways of trapping, outsmart the animals, and accumulate enough beaver hides to win the hand of a trader’s daughter. But soon the simple quest becomes a byzantine-like mess of challenges, levels, and characters (Santa Claus — who is also Yukon Cornelius in this universe? — becomes his mentor). Meanwhile, the beaver civilization is building its own Tower of Babel to (presumably) challenge God himself, and re-chew the whole universe in its own image. Can Kayak stop them?
The biggest critical “rave” about this film has been its gags (Mike Wesolowski is credited as “gag man,” an old role summoned up from the chthonic depths of cinematic history.) They come on fast and gory: beavers get impaled by icicles, shredded by giant fans. His crush, the merchant’s daughter (Olivia Graves) hacks up their bodies, and pulls out a giant stuffed heart with smiley maggots inside. He lures his quarry to their dooms by sculpting increasingly ridiculous figures out of snow, and flinging them from trebuchets.
The wide shots which involve CGI mattes are particularly magical, with an eerie timelessness and murky, antique look (it’s grainy; little flickers dance across the screen). I’m surprised no one has compared it to The Lighthouse yet; its cinematography (by Quinn Hester) has the same dioramic charm and weird sublimity.
Earlier I mentioned “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”: Hundreds of Beavers is pretty much the comedy equivalent, and operates in the same vein of Great Lakes faux-mythology (I was well into my 20s when I found out that the Edmund Fitzgerald actually sank in the 1970s; I had presumed from the whole sea-chanty vibe and Song of Hiawatha lyrics that it had sunk in, like, the distant 1800s). Beavers is as playful with this mythology as “Fitzgerald” is serious. Its opening sequence could be described as Washington-Irving-Core: Johnny Appleseed motifs, buckled hats, flagons. Burly trappers and Indian chiefs carouse in a throaty, fiddly folk song (also by Tewes) that’s delightfully unintelligible, and calls to mind the Davy Crockett theme.
It’s been about 6 generations since the frontier age, and I sometimes think that in the Midwest’s ganglionic memory there persists a wholesome cultural conviction that the world should be like Oregon Trail: collect resources, complete tasks, etc. Hundreds of Beavers works so well as a Midwestern fantasia because it uses this mindset — the always-struggling, always-striving, always storing-away — as its framework, and takes it to absurdist heights. Jean and the animals are all engaged in endless, repetitious quests of resource acquisition,1 this universal cannibalism eventually evolves into a full-fledged game with stats (there is a beaver kill counter). The mechanistic logic of certain running gags actually becomes incorporated as worldbuilding; Jean Kayak, like a slapstick Maud’dib, must learn the ways of this gory, joke universe before he can become its master. And in true Midwestern style, he perseveres through hard work! despite not being the brightest or the best. Hundreds of Beavers ends with a bacchanalia of utter carnage, a kill count that goes quite possibly to infinity.
Hundreds of Beavers is a violent, sprawling barrel of delights, a simultaneous homage to silent films, the Looney Toons, and the ancient landscape of the Northwoods frontier. Like a Butterburger or a fish fry or a cabin-themed restaurant, it’s a good time on a fundamental level.
10/10. Eviscerating.
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Hundreds of Beavers is available to watch at home on Prime and Fandor.
They’re also doing a roadshow of local screenings at indie theatres throughout the country, detailed on their Facebook.
For NYC friends, it’s also playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan, and Apr. 29, May 4-5 at the Syndicated Bar/Theatre/Kitchen in Williamsburg.
Can’t wait to watch this!
Finding the hidden Jack-a-lope at a Northwoods establishment is always satisfying. That and introducing the species to ignorant guests.