'Hundreds of Beavers' Turns the Silent Movie Wackiness Up To Eleven

By Petr Navovy | Film | August 30, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | August 30, 2024 |

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve complained about a film released these days being un-cinematic. Netflix films are frequent culprits—and I sure as hell moan about them a lot—but they aren’t the only ones. I don’t mean that every film has to look like Ran, but it does seem that so many movies released nowadays are unmoored from the history and tradition of movie making, like the craft is being lost and the basics of blocking, pacing, and everything else are being forgotten. Blame the rise of digital and the attendant possibility of being able to get, essentially, an infinite number of shots. Blame the increased ease of distribution. Blame quality control on the part of the streaming giants. I don’t know what the real cause is, but whatever it is, its effects are clear and widespread.

Hundreds Of Beavers, directed by Mike Cheslik and co-written by Cheslik and its star, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews (what a name!), bucks this trend by being a film that hearkens back to the very beginnings of cinema. Debuting at Fantastic Fest way back in 2022 before hitting VOD in April of this year, this is a silent, black-and-white slapstick comedy tapping into the great tradition of Chaplin, Keaton, and Abbott and Costello. Following the fortunes of a 19th-century applejack salesman (Tews), Hundreds of Beavers charts his journey in the frozen wilderness of the Upper Midwest of the U.S., starting out as a desperate, wacky survival story but gradually morphing into an indictment of industrial, extractive capitalism and humanity’s cruelty towards nature. The wackiness only increases as things progress.

Tews throws himself fully into the role, grappling with the cruel Midwestern winter as much as the endless procession of mischievous and dangerous beavers, rabbits, and wolves (all played by human beings in cheap animal costumes the crew purchased online). Grimacing and screaming and guffawing broadly as the format demands, he’s in pretty much every scene, without any audible dialogue, and he performs admirably. That performance would all be for naught, however, if the film wasn’t structured and shot the way it is. I can only imagine the scale of storyboarding that was needed for Hundreds Of Beavers. It has paid off. If projects like The Union and The Gray Man feel completely formless, with shots seemingly chosen at random with no regard for purpose or theme, then Hundreds of Beavers is the polar opposite. The gag-a-second approach here is reminiscent of Airplane. It never quite reaches the heights of that peerless example of the joke avalanche approach—there are moments where the rhythm falters, and things can get a bit overwhelming—but this is a project to be applauded nevertheless.

It’s also just a fantastic name for a film.