The Woodsman review

A success at some of 2004's biggest film festivals - thanks to its daring storyline - The Woodman tackles one of cinema's last great taboo subjects: paedophilia. What's more, unlike Gregg Araki's similarly themed Mysterious Skin, a bona fide Hollywood star makes a career gamble in playing the central character. For the ever-excellent Kevin Bacon, it's a move that pays off. Talk of an Oscar may be premature, but he certainly treads where many of his fellow actors wouldn't dream of. It's a brave and daring performance in a film which does have some serious flaws, namely in painting its subject with too broad strokes.

Bacon plays Walter, who at the beginning of the film has been released from a twelve-year prison sentence for a crime that we only learn the specifics of later in the movie. Walter is a loner, and is given a work placement in a lumber factory and resettled in an apartment which strangely overlooks the neighbourhood school. He spends his time keeping a low profile, attending weekly psychiatric visits, and trying to quell his demons by writing down his thoughts.

At work, Walter meets Vickie (played by Kyra Sedgwick, Bacon's wife) and a relationship begins. Tortured over whether to tell Vickie of his past or not, Bacon initially decides that silence is the best option. He tries to get in touch with his family, but his sister, the mother of a young girl, refuses to see him. Only his brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt) will pay him occasional, cautious, visits. Meanwhile, as he looks out of his window upon the school, he notices another man hanging about on a daily basis. Nicknaming him the Candyman, due to the fact that he is clearly trying to lure kids with the offer of sweets, Walter worries that he himself will be suspected of a new crime, and he is soon being paid visits by a local police detective (Mos Def).

Bacon plays the tortured soul struggling to seek redemption to perfection. In the recent Mystic River, he played an adult victim of child abuse, and now he convinces again as a man with a past that will always haunt him. The film's key scene is a breathtaking moment between Bacon and a little girl he meets in a park, when he is tempted back to his old ways and we finally understand the true nature of his condition. The relationship with Vickie is also well handled, with Sedgwick also fighting her own demons, and Bratt and Mos Def provide solid support.

The Woodsman asks the question of whether society can ever really come to terms with a former paedophile, and successfully portrays the angst such a criminal has to go through once out of prison. However, it also edges unnecessarily into the lurid: it seems a convenient trick to place Bacon's character near a school, and the Candyman figure raises the uncomfortable question of whether there can be a good paedophile as opposed to a bad one. Redemption, of a sort, is achieved, but the message is mixed, leaving it as a film that will be remembered for a great performance than for its tricky subject matter.