Originally published 1/21/05
The Woodsman
Director: Nicole Kassell
Writers: Steven Fechter and Nicole Kassell, based on the play by Steven Fechter
Producer: Lee Daniels
Stars: Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, David Alan Grier, Eve, Benjamin Bratt, Mos Def, Hannah Pilkes
Is it that they see in one another a sympathetic memory of hurt that gives them comfort? Or is it that they provide for each other a taste of some painfully-revisited pattern; and if so, is the safe exposure to it they get here part of healing, or setting them down the path towards reliving their worst moments?
These and many other questions surround the love story at the heart of The Woodsman. That the lovers in question are played by real-life couple Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick is, for once, incidental, I’m happy to say. There is a natural chemistry between them, but unlike most times, we never feel like we’re watching some glamour couple flaunt their genetic superiority.
It’s for what’s unglamorous about The Woodsman that we watch. Walter (Kevin Bacon) has just been released after twelve years in prison and he’s returning to his hometown. The only landlord who will have him for a tenant rooms him right across from an elementary school. As he stares out his window at it, face a guarded mixture of curiosity, longing and fear, we begin to gather the nature of his horrible crimes.
Walter is a pedophile, and was convicted of molesting little girls who ranged in age from 10-12. Also, he specifies, one who was 9 and claimed to be 11, and one who was 14 and claimed to be 12. His particular mania for this stage of development is impenetrable – a therapist tries to suggest Walter took early erotic pleasure from napping with his sister when they were children but Walter fiercely denies it. “I just liked smelling her hair”.
How he came to be this way is not the movie’s goal to reveal. And what satisfying answer could it provide, really? Walter is a sick man; what’s more he knows he’s sick – he catches himself idly following a girl in a shopping mall and runs to his therapist in a panic. Seeing that he wants to get well, we want him to get well, and dread that he won’t.
That Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick), a hot-tempered co-worker at the lumber mill at which he gets hired, is able to hear this and not be immediately driven away is where his life begins to move down a different track. He’s frank that the odds favor him repeating his evils and going back to jail until his death. But she’s got her own history that’s uniquely equipped her to see past a person’s deeds to a nature underneath them.
Try as they might, everyone else in Walter’s world can’t help but see him as an abomination and an animal. There’s the lumber mill secretary (Eve), whose advances are rejected by Walter and, after she learns about his history, decides that he needs to be reminded of it. As if he’s forgotten.
There’s his brother-in-law Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), who acts as intermediary for a sister still deciding if she can bring herself to see him (she has a daughter, after all). Carlos is affectionate but there’s anger always a hair’s breadth away. And there’s the cop (Mos Def) who drops in for unannounced searches of the apartment once in awhile, and whose initially venomous dialogues with Walter evolve into something that’s a little more helpful to both of them.
It’s all anchored around an impressive performance by Bacon, long an underrated actor, who’s developed a whole different posture language for Walter. There’s none of the cocky swagger of his astronaut in Apollo 13, but neither is there the totally broken retreat into self of Murder in the First (a histrionic melodrama nearly redeemed by his work). From the way he stuffs his hands in his pockets to the way his chest seems to shrink back, you can see not only the suffering of a long imprisonment, but a person at war with his own impulses.
You can hear it in the entries in the journal he keeps, and the way he describes his suspicions about that guy in the car that’s always parked outside the school. We’ve had decades of alcoholics, dope fiends, serial killers, but you’d have to go all the way back to Peter Lorre in M to find someone so fearlessly diligent in bringing anything in the neighborhood of this compulsion to the screen in a sympathetic role.
The cast around him is restrained, quietly effective. I especially like the way Mos Def, hardly varying his tone of voice, modulates his disgust with his growing sense that Walter might be trying to be something more than his rap sheet. And excellent in a key role is child actor Hannah Pilkes as Robin, who takes the bus to the park to look at birds, and about whom nothing more should be said in this review.
Every so often the stage roots of The Woodsman betray themselves in a particular dialogue flourish or scene construction, but overall Nicole Kassell’s adaptation breathes easy on screen. The Pennsylvania locations are lived in and worth every spot of rust and overcast sky (movies like this would suffocate on some backlot set), and Nathan Larson provides a musical score that vibrates like an ever-tightening rubber band under the action.
I questioned the coincidentally widespread abuse among the characters, there’s perhaps one too many who have some experience with Walter’s type of crime. But each in their way is essential to the design of the story. It’s difficult to imagine getting to the conclusion they did without all of them, and it’s difficult to imagine audiences accepting a lead character like Walter without a conclusion like the one they find, which feels just right.
In the end The Woodsman doesn’t have the emotional breadth of a Monster’s Ball, or a Monster, for that matter. It’s fundamentally smaller, quieter. Walter seems to speak in a smaller and smaller voice the closer he comes to surrendering to his desires, and the movie follows suit; quietly, fearfully, but with hope.