Ray Pride

How to make tasteful films about distasteful subjects?

And why? (If your name is Todd Solondz, the question's not directed to you.) Nicole Kassell's spare, sorrowful "The Woodsman" is superbly made, concisely observed, capably acted (for the most part) and allows its characters to hesitate, to consider, to contemplate bad thoughts and worse deeds. But. The big but. But is there an audience for a story about the emotional needs of a man (Kevin Bacon) just out of prison after twelve years, still wrestling with his desire to be physically intimate with little girls? To smell their hair? Not to hurt them, he might say, but...

Martin Scorsese's 1975 "Taxi Driver" is reissued this week in New York, and the Village Voice's Michael Atkinson calls it "truly a phenomenon from another day and age. Which is to say, imagine a like-minded film of this decade killing at the box office and getting nommed for Best Picture." Scorsese's expressive visuals are the most out-of-time feature: look at any of the many movies from Sundance that tackle terrible topics, and the visual style is usually pinioned somewhere between old-style network television and simple poverty.

"The Woodsman," adapted from a Steven Fechter play by Fechter and Kassell, is swift and sure in showing us what it's about. The visual style is restrained but apt. "The Woodsman" is not about the sin, but the sinner, about Walter (Bacon), a furniture maker who acted against one of society's most impassioned taboos. He is a man who is uncomfortable in his own skin after more than a decade of having to confine his hopes and desires and fears and guilt. Kassell isn't out to explore the prison melodramatics of a play like Miguel Pinero's 1975 "Short Eyes" or even what happens to child molesters in prison. "The Woodsman" is about the damage of being a perpetual outsider, convicted and listed and an alien wherever you land. (Especially if the only landlord who will rent to you offers an apartment in a rundown part of Philadelphia less than 350 yards from a schoolyard.) And someone who's ridden by their compulsions as well: what good can come of befriending a bird-watching 12-year-old named Robin?

The fortysomething Walter, working at a woodshop and keeping to himself, meets a woman his own age, Vicki, played by Bacon's longtime wife, Kyra Sedgwick. Tough yet tender: sounds like a cliché, but the writing and Sedgwick make the surfaces hum. Walter is reticent. Vicki is hungry. They become intimate, but he's reluctant to be drawn out. His brother-in-law, Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), is the only person from his past who still talks to him. He remembers Walter being the first person to defend the "brown" man marrying into the family. His sister doesn't forgive. They have a young daughter. She doesn't trust her own blood. Walter is also circled by a Sgt. Lucas (Mos Def), who makes surprise visits to see that Walter is being "a good boy." Mos Def is a gratifyingly precise and charismatic performer, and his toe-to-toe scenes with Bacon are rich.

Walter is being good. But from his window, he can see the footwork of another predator, one who teases and cajoles boys, whom Walter writes about in a therapist-suggested journal as "Candy." He sees the patterns. He keeps to himself. But just outside his window, he recognizes the behavior he is supposed to have done his time for, paid his dues.

When Tim Roth made his powerful "The War Zone" (1999), about a loving father who still acted on his compulsion to have sex with his daughter, he talked about the people with "blue heads," "how we don't know who they are," he told me. While his film shows things that Kassell's does not, a similar point is made in "The Woodsman." "We worked hard to make that point in the film," Roth said. "He's an ordinary man. If we knew who they were, the blue heads, for example? We'd kill 'em. It would all finish. It wouldn't exist. Life is not that easy or we'd cage them. It would all just go away. We'd breed it out of them! There are no solutions. There's no answers. You choose your reasons as an audience. You choose your own story. How did it start, why did it start, why does he do that, and so on. What happens in the end? What does mom know, does she know anything, et cetera et cetera. You choose as an audience member. If we had answers, if we had solutions, there'd be no point in making the film."

When Todd Solondz made "Happiness," that writer-director's deep, dark need to be the jock-of-shock sings through in the notorious scene where a boy whimpers profanely for attentions from his child-raping father. Kassell is after something more humane, more human: the need to make peace with society, to define and refine one's erotic desires, simply to touch another person. The lovemaking scenes between Walter and Vicki are explicit. There is surprise and confusion. But Bacon conveys that throughout, once a predator, now an alien: without torrents of confession or tableaux of confusion, his performance writhes with reflections of Walter's roiling inner states. (Sometimes it seems like indigestion fueled by lava.) When Walter and Robin meet a second time in the park, the scene is almost unbearable, the confidence and flirtation and thrill that plays across Bacon's face as he works the girl's confusion and brings out her vulnerabilities and almost, almost, almost gets his desired result from the question, "Robin, would you like to sit on my lap?"

The scene is unbearable. The writing is exact. The terror is excruciating. The child actress is heartbreaking. The stakes are awful. I turned away. Kassell doesn't, Bacon doesn't. Is there redemption? In fables and in stories, and in Bacon's haunted features as he tries to put one of Walter's feet in front of the other.

"The Woodsman" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2005-01-04)

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