Posted: 02/12/2005

The Woodsman

(2005)

by Kristin Schrader

“What’s the worse thing you’ve ever done?” Everyone has an answer to this that is bound to cause sadness or embarrassment, maybe something that even changed his or her life. The worse thing that Walter, played by Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman, did hurt him, hurt his family, hurt his victims, and isn’t necessarily over.

Walter is just out of prison and back in his hometown. He spent twelve years inside for molesting little girls, and has been released back into the regular world to try and get by. He has weekly visits with a therapist, and he secures a job at a lumberyard. He works on a saw, keeps to himself, and goes back to his apartment to gaze out the window at a schoolyard. After awhile tough, hi-lo driving Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick) makes overtures towards the recluse, and they end up back in his apartment. Vickie tries to get Walter to reveal his elephant-in-the-room level dark secret, but for the time being he refuses. The two couple, and start to build a relationship, and Walter starts to develop a life. All this despite Walter’s very real urges towards pre-adolescent girls, and Vickie’s inability to pry the mystery from her lover.

One night Walter answers Vickie with “What’s the worse thing you’ve ever done?” Walter’s query to Vickie prompts a story of a best friend betrayed, and the shame that still stems from the incident. It s a sudden flare of honesty, that provokes the same in Walter, but when he shares the reason he did time, he becomes defensive and she doesn’t know what to say. The couple splits over this revelation just as much over the inability to communicate about the crime as the crime itself. The tenuous connection Walter had to other human beings is ruptured yet again. Only his brother-in-law maintains his relationship with the reclusive Bacon.

Walter swings in and out of seeming to be a really regular guy trying to get a handle on a horrifying disease, and being very scary in his lack of mental wellness. The way he slips over the line is quick and surprising, and his inability to recognize that misstep when it happens really is perhaps the most unusual insight into his mind. When he is speaking to a little girl named Robin, incredibly well-acted by Hannah Pilkes, we finally see how he interacts with his victims, and the sort of damage it may do them.

The Woodsman is most notable for its restraint. Pedophilia-bad, relationship-hopeful, abuse-cyclical. It could have come off like an after-school special. Instead director Nicole Kassell brushes each aspect of the film with such a discriminating brush the viewer is never presented with a judgment or an emotion of anyone’s but their own. Mos Def plays Sergeant Lucas, a cop who is keeping an eye on Walter because he is well aware of the rate of recitivism. His performance is wonderfully restrained, as is Eve’s. The nosey office worker at the lumberyard where Walter and Vickie are employed is never over the top or unreasonably aggressive, she is just doing what a lot of people might when confronted with a sex offender at the workplace. Particularly well played is the role of Carlos, Walter’s brother-in-law. Benjamin Bratt is very judicious with his affection for Bacon’s character, and may be more aware of the pedophile’s weaknesses than anyone, save his therapist. There is even another pedophile that is a large part of this film, someone we watch the length of the film, but again the restraint is there to keep The Woodsman from becoming freak show where child molesters lurk around every corner.

There were times during The Woodsman I thought I should be flinching and I wasn’t, and times that I was and I wondered why. That is the beauty of this unexpectedly delicate film. The movie changed perspective so subtly that the viewer is pulled in softly and pushed out gently like a ball rolling out from an elementary playground.

Kristin Schrader lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She watches lots of movies.

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