Movie Review - Portrait of an Ex-Pedophile
March 22, 2021
For a change of pace, I am posting a movie review.
"The Woodsman" (2004) is a deft portrait of a man, (Kevin Bacon) who served 12 years in prison for molesting tweenage girls. He overcomes ostracism and temptation in order to reform. This is not a defence of pedophiles. He beats one up. It is an intelligent, courageous portrait of a man who is struggling with temptation. "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone..." (John 8:7)
And best of all, it's free on YouTube.
Roger Ebert--"This is not a morality play but a study of Walter's character, and of those who instinctively detest him, and of a few, including Vickie and his brother-in-law Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), who are willing to withhold judgment long enough to see if he can find redemption."
The movie harkens back to the Pre-Covid era when we were free to sin, and repent without being branded and bridled like cattle and horses. To a time when movies could be independent and honest.
by Roger Ebert (Jan 6, 2005)
(henrymakow.com)
For the first several scenes of "The Woodsman," we know that Walter has recently been released from prison but we don't know the nature of his crime. Seeing the film at Cannes last May, I walked in without advance knowledge and was grateful that I had an opportunity to see Kevin Bacon establish the character before that information was supplied. His crime has now been clearly named in virtually everything written about the film, and possibly changes the way it affects a viewer.
Walter is a pedophile. The film doesn't make him a case study or an object for our sympathy, but carefully and honestly observes his attempt to re-enter society after 12 years behind bars. Maybe he will make it and maybe he will not. He has a deep compulsion, which is probably innate, and a belief that his behavior is wrong. That belief will not necessarily keep him from repeating it. Most of us have sexual desires within the areas accepted by society, and so never reflect that we did not choose them, but simply grew up and found that they were there.
Bacon is a strong and subtle actor, something that is often said but insufficiently appreciated. Here he employs all of his art. He seems to have no theory about Walter and no emotional tilt toward his problems, and that is correct, because we do not act out of theories about ourselves, but out of our hopes and desires. Bacon plays the character day by day, hour by hour, detail by detail, simply showing us this man trying to deal with his daily life. Larger conclusions are left to the audience.
He gets an apartment across from a grade school playground. He did not choose the location; he found a landlord who would rent to an ex-con. He gets a job in a lumberyard. No one there knows about his crime, but a co-worker named Mary-Kay (Eve) doesn't like him and senses something is wrong. Lucas, his parole officer (Mos Def) visits regularly and is hostile, convinced it is only a matter of time until Walter lapses.
There is a woman at work named Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick), who is tough-talking but has an instinctive sympathy for the newcomer. She's a fork-lift operator, a realist. They start to date. We know, but she doesn't, that this may be the first normal sexual relationship Walter has had. She is not only his girlfriend but, in a way, an unknowing sex therapist. He eventually feels he has to tell her about his past. How she deals with this, how she goes through a series of emotions, is handled in a way I felt was convincing.
Mary-Kay finds out the truth about Walter, and posts a Web site at work. His privacy is gone. There are other developments. Watching the playground through his window, for example, he becomes aware of a pedophile who is obviously hoping to find prey there.
The film has a crucial scene involving Walter and a young girl named Robin (Hannah Pilkes). Without suggesting how the scene develops, I will say that it is so observant, so truthful, that in a sense the whole film revolves around it. There is nothing sensational in this film, nothing exploitative, nothing used for "entertainment value" unless we believe, as I do, that the close observation of the lives of other people can be -- well, since entertaining is the wrong word, then helpful. It is easy to present a pedophile as a monster, less easy to suggest the emotional devastation that led into, and leads out of, his behavior. The real question in "The Woodsman" is whether Walter will be able to break the chain of transmission.
The movie is the first film by Nicole Kassell, a recent graduate of the NYU film school, who wrote the screenplay with Steven Fechter, based on his play. It is a remarkably confident work. It knows who Walter is, and to an extent why he is that way, and it knows that the film's real drama exists inside his mind and conscience...
The reason we cannot accept pedophilia as we accept many other sexual practices is that it requires an innocent partner, whose life could be irreparably harmed. We do not have the right to do that. If there is no other way to achieve sexual satisfaction, that is our misfortune, but not an excuse. It is not the pedophile that is evil, but the pedophilia. That is true of all sins and crimes and those tempted to perform them: It is not that we are capable of transgression that condemns us, but that we are willing.
"The Woodsman" understands this at the very heart of its being, and that is why it succeeds as more than just the story of this character. It has relevance for members of the audience who would never in any way be even remotely capable of Walter's crime. We are quick to forgive our own trespasses, slower to forgive those of others. The challenge of a moral life is to do nothing that needs forgiveness. In that sense, we're all out on parole.
RM said (March 23, 2021):
On the “Woodsmanâ€, and pedophilia, it highlights, by the violation of them, the two main tenets of every great society. Not only are these two tenets in the Bible, though the dysfunctional modern Christian church has badly lost its way, but, the brilliant British agnostic anthropologist J.D. Unwin, highlighted them in his seminal 1934 exhaustive study of both civilized and uncivilized societies. The two rules he found that led to successful societies were, sex must be delayed until heterosexual marriage, and it must be confined there after marriage.
Incredibly, he began his studies to prove the Freudian psychobabble that societies that did not freely indulge in sex were “repressed†and inferior. He found exactly the opposite. He studied 80 uncivilized societies and 6 civilized societies and found the exact same pattern repeating itself. Every society that left these two tenets, collapsed on the third generation. America is on the third generation now.
This is in the Bible too. Pharaoh went about destroying the Jews the wrong way. He tried to kill their male children, and work them hard. The family unit and religion was left intact. In America, not only are babies being slaughtered, and we are being worked hard by taxes, inflation, and regulations, but the family unit and church are under unprecedented attack, with milquetoast pastors failing to protect their churches and preach truth. Balaam advised the Moabite King Balak what to do to destroy a culture.
Revelation 2:14. But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication.
And that is what Balak did, sending in the Moabite women to seduce the Jewish men, leading to 1 Cor 10:8, “Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand.â€
Not only did 23,000 Jews die in one day from a plague, for fornication, but, Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron, took a javelin and gave a leading prince of the tribe of Simeon, Zimri, the death penalty for taking a Princess of Moab in a tent and fornicating with her in full view of the congregation. He literally killed them both in the act of coitus.
And, until America has men with the zeal and moral compass of Phinehas, our slavery and plagues will not end.