The Woodsman (2004) (USA)

[hengcs]

Well, I have just watched this movie.
;)

What I like?
-- Undoubtedly, Kevin Bacon's performance! He is very controlled. ;) And having seen him in tons of movies, he still comes across very convincingly. However, I suspect that his chances of being nominated for Oscar might be overlooked because of (i) tougher competition, (ii) often the impact of the movie as a whole will help/dampen an actor's chances.
-- There is a very compelling scene by Kevin Bacon ... wow
-- The script has depth/complexity. It has several opportunities to be very interesting ... BUT BUT BUT ... (see below under weaknesses)
-- The movie seems so real (as it happens so often around us ...)


What I find weak?
-- Pardon me for saying (esp. if you are a fan of them), but the rest of the supporting cast are NOT compelling (e.g., the doctor/psychologist, the police, the brother-in-law, the clerk, etc.) In most movies, supporting roles are just as critical!
-- Although the script is good, somehow (either the directing or editing or the soundtrack) does NOT draw you too deeply into the plot (i.e., compelling the audience to want to know what happens next). MANY times, there are VERY GOOD opportunities that nearly draw one in, BUT the director just let that slips by ... and the movie continues in a low key kind of way ... and suddenly the movie just ends ...


Conclusion:
Go watch mainly for Kevin's performance and a thoughtful script (although not sufficiently well executed/exploited).
;)

[Chris Knipp]

NICOLE KASSELL: THE WOODSMAN

by Chris Knipp

Serious stuff

Once in a while a popular actor like Kevin Bacon does something challenging and fresh and difficult and it works. Let's face it, I'm a character actor, Kevin has said in interviews. Well, he's that and more, as the teenage girls who had to have a copy of Footloose for their personal video libraries could tell you. He's simply a modest actor with great range. He's had other difficult, challenging roles: Murder in the First is one of the more notably so. That was gruelling to do. This one is more subtle. Most of what's going on with the main character in The Woodsman is internal. Bacon's job is not to make him into a monster, or too appealing: to keep us guessing, to show the complexity of the situation and the man.

Nicole Kassell, a new director, has chosen to make a movie about a convicted pedophile who's just been released on parole after more than a decade in jail.

This story is at the opposite extreme from the Italian production shot in Russia in English starring Malcolm MacDowell, David Grieco's Evilenko, which unfortunately has no US distribution. MacDowell's character was known as "the monster of Rostov" and was a truly horrific and repulsive serial killer, mostly of young boys and girls (MacDowell is powerful and terrifying in the role: it's one of his best performances ever), and the movie is about tracking him down. Walter (Bacon) has never "hurt" the young girls he molested, and he's "paid his debt to society." The question the movie poses is whether we can accept him as a person; whether he can accept himself; whether those around him can accept him (that may be the hardest task) -- and (most crucial if he's to remain on the outside) whether he can change, not revert to his old behavior.

Walter has been allowed to return to where he used to work, as a machinist, a job he's known to have done well. (And just as in the recent Christian Bale movie The Machinist, some unpleasantness is going to happen at the shop.) He has a place to live -- strangely, across from an elementary school; but that's the only landlord who would take him. Eventually, he has a girlfriend (real-life Bacon spouse Kyra Sedgwick), though that doesn't seem to work very well after a while. Walter is trying so hard to be "normal" and unobtrusive that he's imploding. He's watching himself, he's watching others, and they're watching him. There's no comfort zone. This makes the physical scenes in bed with Kyra raw and intense. His anger and frustration shows in sessions with a therapist, and he's periodically tormented by a visiting cop, Lucas (Mos Def, in a fresh and original performance), and more gently teased by his brother-in-law, Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), who's frinedly -- but only up to a point.

There are some moments in The Woodsman that aren't easy to watch. You realize that maybe nothing is harder for an ex-con than to live a "normal" life, doubly or quadruply so for a pedophile. Kassell's movie (which she collaborated with Stephen Fechter in adapting from his play) avoids earnestness by always showing, never telling -- never explaining or lecturing, never giving things away too soon. The movie's pacing is successful in making the very little that happens for much of the time nonetheless interesting and suspenseful. When things do happen it's so quietly intense you hold your breath. This is serious stuff, and not much fun, but there's hope in it, and it takes us somewhere new. Perhaps the result will be too unspectacular for most tastes, but the movie stays in the mind, and Bacon's performance is as good as people are saying it is.

[oscar jubis]

I like your review, Chris. My only problem with the movie is how all the female characters have a history of being victimized. Too many coincidences. The bird-watching girl is being abused by her father, the lover/co-worker was abused by all three of her brothers, he happens to witness a man who preys on young boys. Bit contrived, wouldn't you say? Yet, the central character is well-written and Bacon's performance is exceptional and worthy of the Academy nomination he didn't get.

[Chris Knipp]

Thank you. You're absolutely right. Sexual abuse is the screenplay's obsession, to the point of coincidences that would be expected in a Nabokov novel but strain credulity in what purports to be a realistic account. I was also struck by the parallel with Mystic River -- which almost seems derivative, or an unconscious immitation -- in Walter's behavior toward the man "who preys on young boys." But I like very much the way this movie was done and it stays in my mind. David Grieco's Evilenko, which I saw in the San Francisco N.I.C.E. Italian film festival, is a horrendously shocking and vivid account and McDowell is very, very good (I hope you get to see it some time), but The Woodsman in its quiet unsensational way has more authentic and memorable emotion: it truly depicts experiences some of us may have had or been close to. It allows us to see a sex offender not as a monster but simply a person trying hard to change, and thus it cuts through the hysteria. That's why I called it "serious stuff." Hence the unrealistic coincidences are inappropriate: you've identified one of its few real faults.