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| A
man alone: Bacon in The Woodsman. |
The
Beast in Me
By
Ann Morrow
The
Woodsman
Directed
by Nicole Kassell
With intense concentra- tion, Walter (Kevin Bacon) counts
the steps between his run-down apartment and the elementary
schoolyard across the street. It’s just under the required
distance of 360-something feet. When he’s not at work at his
new job in a lumberyard, where he keeps to himself, Walter
likes to watch the schoolkids at play. He’s just been released
from a 12-year prison sentence, and the location of his apartment
is the central contrivance of The Woodsman, an unflinching
look at one man’s rehabilitation. Walter is a pedophile, and
it’s unbelievable that his therapist or his shrewd parole
officer (Mos Def) would allow such close proximity to children.
Despite this glaring lapse of reason, The Woodsman
is at once admirable for its stringent objectivity, and repellent
for its unblinking view of Walter’s psychological struggle.
“When
will I be normal?” he asks his therapist, even though he’s
tight-lipped and defensive during their sessions. At work,
he attracts the attention of Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick), a hard-as-nails
forklift driver who aggressively pursues him. “I’m not easily
shocked,” she tells him while trying to get him to open up
about himself. But when he tells her that he molested little
girls, she’s not quite tough enough to accept it. At least
not at first. But Vickie has her own, disturbingly complementary
baggage, and she softens toward him after his crimes are exposed
at the lumberyard—an incident that drives Walter deeper into
denial of his guilt. While Vickie makes him feel human, the
parole officer goes out of his way to make him feel like a
monster. All Walter wants is to stay out of trouble and therefore
stay out of jail. When he notices a man befriending young
boys at the playground, he knows immediately that the man
is a pedophile, and he observes the man’s progress with a
mix of resentful envy and shame that he is too afraid of the
police to alert them.
Directed and co-adapted from the play by first-time filmmaker
Nicole Kassell, The Woodsman is carefully crafted,
with a low-key grimness that hinges on Bacon’s tightly wound
performance. But the plot relies too much on coincidence—such
as the involvement of the bright and wary young girl that
Walter stalks in the park—and not enough on the kind of informed
reflection that the parole officer brings to his visits to
Walter’s apartment (this is a starmaking performance from
Def). The Woodsman is the kind of film that exists
only to be thoughtfully yet deliberately provocative. But
because of the officer’s dedicated watchfulness, we don’t
have to fear that Walter will strike again, giving the film
a safety net that amounts to a cop-out.
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