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Movie Review: The Woodsman
By William Sternman
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The
Woodsman
Starring Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Mos Def
Directed by Nicole Kassell
Written by Steven Fechter
Great
art—literature, drama and, yes, film—helps us to become human
by letting us break out of our egocentric shells and live someone else’s
life. Just as childhood pets teach us empathy for another’s suffering,
vicarious experience lets us in on one of the best-kept secrets of human
existence: we are all cut from the same cloth. There but for the grace
of God, or the gods, or whatever, go each and every one of us. We all
have our faults and our dirty little secrets. (God—or whatever—knows
I have more than my share, although this review is perhaps not the best
place to air them.) When those secrets become public and overshadow our
shared humanity, the result can be excruciatingly painful for the individual
who is singled out from the crowd of enthusiastic would-be stone throwers.
“Let him who is guiltless” falls by the wayside in our zeal
to confirm our own innocence at someone else’s expense. (“I
didn’t do it, Daddy. Johnny did it.”)
The Woodsman is about a pedophile that returns home after twelve years in prison. He is still a pedophile even though he is in therapy. In the movie’s most powerful moment, Walter (Kevin Bacon) asks his doctor, “When will I be normal?” This simple question is really a cri de coeur, an unanswerable scream of existential pain and angst. It still reverberates in my skull.
In the movie’s climactic scene, Walter is alone for the second time in a deserted park with an eleven-year-old girl. Despite all he’s been through, the desire to act out with her is almost irresistible. But as he talks with her, he realizes something that he never had with any of his other victims (who he self-servingly contends he never harmed), and you can feel the tectonic plates of his psyche start to shift. She is no longer an impersonal object of desire but a feeling, suffering human being in her own right. This is the point when he starts to become normal.
Yet no matter where he is in his own emotional development, Walter has to contend with the stone-throwers: a secretary whose advances Walter rejects takes her revenge by outing him to his coworkers, a sadistic cop (Mos Def) delights in humiliating him, and his Hispanic brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt) is his good buddy until the chips are down.
But there’s also Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick) who is eventually able to check her own baggage as well as his to join her own flawed humanity with his in a loving relationship.
Nicole Kassell (who co-wrote the script with first-time scenarist Steven Fechter) directs her second movie the way Frederick Wiseman crafted his famous documentaries (Hospital, High School etc.). There is no voiceover, no special pleading, no tearing of hair nor rending of garments. There is just one dispassionately observed scene after another until the story is told and you are left to draw your own conclusions.
In all the justifiable hoopla over the acting of Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in Mystic River, most people seemed to have overlooked the authoritatively reserved performance of Kevin Bacon in the less flashy role of the investigating police officer. In The Woodsman, his performance is even subtler: it’s not what he says or does that is so compelling but what you’re able to read in his face and eyes.
The title refers to the forester in “Little Red Riding Hood” who frees the little girl unharmed from the wolf’s stomach. I think a better allusion would have been to the tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz, who longs for a heart. By the end of The Woodsman, both Walter and Sgt. Lucas (Mos Def) have discovered that they have always had hearts, even if they didn’t know where they were.
I am always skeptical of hopeful endings, even one as muted as the one in The Woodsman. But I want to believe in this one as much for my own sake as for Walter’s.
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William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
©
2005 Me Three