THE WOODSMAN

Hey, I have no idea how to make a great film about a pedophile. I've been intrigued by this film and have wanted to see it since I heard last fall that it was coming. I was surprised the film didn't generate more critical buzz or publicity when it was released with the other end-of-year award contenders. I'm not surprised now; it isn't very good.

Kevin Bacon (Quicksilver) plays Walter, who has just been paroled following a twelve year prison sentence for molesting young girls. Walter takes an apartment across the street from a grade school and a job at a lumber yard and waits for either his proclivities or Megan's Law to catch up with him. His family, apart from his sister's husband, has disowned him, and his other substantial relationships are compelled by law: the therapist who monitors his progress and the cop waiting for his next misstep.

Walter stumbles into a relationship with a hard-edged fellow lumber worker played by Bacon's real-life wife, Kyra Sedgwick. Sedgwick readily adopts the fatalism of someone with her own history of lousy choices, but it takes more than wearing a Norma Rae handkerchief and cursing like a sailor to convince me that a woman who looks like she does would work at a lumberyard and throw herself at the visibly-disturbed Walter. Hitchcock rightly said that the critic who wants to talk plausibility is generally a dull fellow, but the concept of a willing love interest for a convicted pedophile requires an attention to emotional detail that can't be met simply by supplying Sedgwick's character with enough cheap abuse baggage of her own to make codependency believable to an audience of armchair psychologists. The fact that such a pivotal and potentially-implausible role was filled by the star actor's wife gives off the scent of desperation. It's the casting equivalent of taking your sister to the prom. Hey, wait.

There aren't exactly a smorgasboard of plot options when you've chosen a character like Walter for your protagonist, so we watch as he tries to keep his job and fights off angry co-workers. Most of all, of course, we watch to see whether he'll do it again. The movie wrings an admirable amount of tension out of a scene on a park bench, but really, it's not within the realm of possibility that a Hollywood film would feature a star as a pedophile and actually show him giving in to it. There are appropriate hints of redemption and the expected open-ended but positive final scene.

So, with that limited range of options, what would anyone want out of a movie like this? Speaking for myself, all I want is insight. It's clear that the American media-viewing populace can't get enough of going inside the minds and psyches of killers and the physical and emotional wounds they inflict (provided there's a sex-ay forensics team to provide playful banter over the body), but the queue of people who'd walk a quarter mile in a pedophile's shoes is not long. And while I can understand the latter (while making no sense of the former), so much of our collective turmoil concerning criminal behavior is best understood against the backdrop of this crime. What causes this kind of aberrance? Can it be controlled? Do we expect our penal system to punish or rehabilitate? What does forgiveness mean from a society's point of view, or from an individual's? Those are large questions, too messy and uncertain to be resolved in any film, so perhaps I shouldn't fault this film for not raising them to my liking. But I doubt this film will move enough people even to wonder about those concerns.