MOVIE REVIEW : Leave It to ‘Beavers,’ IMAX’s Latest Triumph

Movies often thrive on the spectacle of one or two dauntless characters taking on “impossible” tasks: Kevin Costner dancing with wolves, Macaulay Culkin surviving a weekend home alone. But it would be hard, ever, to top the feat accomplished on-screen by the amazing co-stars of the new IMAX film, “Beavers” (at the Museum of Science and Industry’s IMAX Theater).

I’m awe-struck by these two--even though they’re nameless, and unrepresented by ICM. They’re round, furry, brown. They barely come up to shin level. They have webbed tails and the sharpest incisors around: teeth that can chomp through a four-inch thick deciduous tree in an hour.

But they have just as much on-screen chemistry as, say, Woody Allen and Bette Midler. After watching them pull their specialty--felling over 200 trees apiece in a single year and constructing an elaborate dam, plus a pond or mini-lake and a domed aquatic dwelling--you should be awe-struck too.

Especially, since their exploits have been filmed in IMAX: the super-deep-focus, five-story-high format that sucks you into the action more effectively than any other film process available. Here, thanks to IMAX, the Canadian Rocky landscapes around the star pair are achingly crisp, stretching off for hundreds of miles toward towering, distant peaks.

Through IMAX eyes, we dive with the beavers underwater, clamber ashore and stay at beaver-eye level while they chomp down trees. We see them construct a dam and dome-shaped domicile. We swim with them through underwater tunnels and pop up into the igloo-like interior.

We flee bears with them, dodge falling trees from a foot or so away, and in one unforgettable moment--which almost recalls the legendary Cary Grant-Ingrid Bergman five-minute kiss from “Notorious”--we stay what seems inches away as the two beavers embrace, coo at each other and undulate slowly and romantically in the shallow water in the ultimate animal love-dance.

There’s some flummery involved. The dam we see at the end of the film--measuring 300 feet across--is obviously not the one our paddle-tailed friends were constructing, but a long-term family project more than 100 years old. And the bear we see chasing the camera is no sudden predator, but a well-seasoned pro from Los Angeles: a veteran of “Bonanza” and “Quest for Fire” carefully hitting his marks.

But what does it matter? The point here is not to give us an utterly scrupulous record but, like Robert Flaherty, to capture the texture of day-to-day life in an environment so alien that few humans have probably ever experienced or seen it in quite this way. That “Beavers” does.

The last new release at the IMAX Theater, “Blue Planet,” exploited the process overwhelmingly: shooting scenes aboard the space shuttle and across the world pegged to a fervent pro-ecology theme. “Beavers”--produced, written and directed by Stephen Low and dazzlingly photographed by Andrew Kitzanuk (“90 Days”) and his crew--has a more seemingly modest goal. It simply wants to show us how beavers build their dams, live their lives.

But, by accomplishing that, by using spare, minimal narration and immersing us in the sights and sounds of the forest world, it brings off a screen coup as impressive as any previous IMAX feat.