Release Date: December 24, 2004
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Mos Def, Benjamin Bratt, Eve, Hannah Pilkes
Directed by: Nicole Kassell
Written by: Nicole Kassell, Steven Fechter
Distributed by: Newmarket Films
MPAA Rating: R (sexuality, disturbing behavior, language)
The Woodsman, an emotional and heartbreaking picture directed by rookie filmmaker Nicole Kassell, does a very good job of putting the viewer inside the life of its main character, despite some considerable obstacles. Not the least of these is that the character in question is a onetime child molester named Walter (Kevin Bacon), who, as the movie begins, has just been released from prison after serving a 12-year sentence.
Normally, this would be as unsympathetic a character as they come (and a role that Bacon, who has played his fair share of misanthropes, would not be averse to taking), but the movie focuses on a different aspect of Walter: His reentrance into society. Crucially, the movie never shows us the heinous crimes that landed Walter in prison -- Walter only briefly describes them in the first act -- but it does paint a vivid, disheartening picture of the narrow avenue along which he now walks.
He takes a job at a lumberyard, but a busybody secretary named Mary-Kay (Eve) soon noses out his past and passes out his rap sheet to the yard’s other workers. He gets an apartment, but it’s across the street from an elementary school -- though he has no choice, because the building’s landlord was the only one around that would rent to convicted felons. A police sergeant named Lucas (Mos Def) frequently visits Walter, demeaning him with every scrap of passive-aggressive intimidation he can muster.
About the only bright spots in Walter’s life are his brother-in-law, Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), and Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick), a woman who works at the lumberyard and who falls in love with the quiet, reserved Walter.
Between all of these characters the movie runs the gamut of society’s range of reactions to former child molesters. Some, like Mary-Kay and Sgt. Lucas, are downright hostile, while others, like Carlos and Vickie, are partially curious and also concerned for Walter’s well being.
The movie, which was written by Kassell and Steven Fechter, gets the viewer to come down on the curious and concerned side of things. We want to believe in Walter: that he has reformed his ways, that he will no longer molest children, that he will begin to live a normal life again. We hate Mary-Kay and Sgt. Lucas for keeping society’s collective foot on Walter’s throat, and we’re thrilled to see otherwise good individuals like Carlos and Vickie giving him a chance.
Much of this is thanks to Bacon’s solid, emotional performance. He plays Walter as an almost inconsolably sad man, who is perhaps more ashamed of himself than society is. It is a terrible thing for him to live across the street from a middle school, like a recovering alcoholic being forced to live across the street from a liquor store. And yet he is constantly pushing himself to ignore whatever sick and twisted urges dominate his mind. Vickie, visiting his apartment, sees the school and says that the noise must bother him. “I like the noise,” he says, fighting to remain calm.
Inevitably, of course, Walter does give into his former self, in a scene near the end of the movie that is extraordinary for how tense and suspenseful it is. Walter finds himself on a city park bench, all alone except an 11-year-old girl named Robin (Hannah Pilkes) who has come to bird-watch, and the movie excruciatingly, inexorably leads Walter to the brink of disaster.
But he is not, at the end of the film, the Walter he was at the beginning, a transformation made possible by the characters around him. Even though we sense he is not exactly normal, there is something different about him, and his encounter with Robin does go entirely as expected. It is a splendid, visible, almost tangible character arc, and one that few movies have the patience to construct.
As it happens, the film’s title, The Woodsman, is a neat double-reference: There is Walter, the lumberyard worker, of course. Halfway through the movie, though, Sgt. Lucas refers to the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” and describes himself as the woodsman -- the character who saves Red and her grandmother from the wolf. Walter clearly aspires to be the second kind of woodsman as well, and, in the movie’s final scene, when he moves out of his apartment and the camera rolls away from the elementary school, you can see that he just may do it.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)