Just the Ticket #58: Ain't No Fairy Tale

With films like Mirror Mirror (coming to Netflix this month) and Snow White and The Huntsman, not to mention TV's two recent (successful) cracks at fairy tale lore, NBC's Grimm and ABC's Once Upon a Time (and their requisite direct-to-video knockoffs) peppering the visual zeitgeist these days, it's fitting that my latest shipment from Netflix would be The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon (X-Men: First Class), wife Kyra Sedgewick (the "I thought it was supposed to be over last season" TNT hit, The Closer), and Mos Def (The Italian Job).

Let's be clear: its subject matter may be grim (LOL), but The Woodsman is no fairy tale. Walter (Bacon) is a registered sex offender, convicted prior to the film's events of molesting his niece and spending 12 years in prison. Unbelievably, he is allowed to live in an apartment across the street from an elementary school (supposedly it's far enough away that he's not in violation, but still; what the fuck?). Yes, I realize I just used the words "violation," "but," and "fuck" in the same sentence. Move on.

In a society where we have had to endure the likes of Jerry Sandusky, David Westerfield, Mary Kay Letorneau, the Catholic Church scandal, and the unsolved murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, you really want to hate Kevin Bacon's Walter. He serves up self-defensive nuggets of denial like "I touched them, but I never hurt them," gets all high and mighty when his parole officer (Mos Def), a mildly sadistic douchebag in his own right, comes poking around the apartment, and cowers into victim mode when his co-workers (incited by rapper Eve) find out what he is and start harassing him--"interfering" with his attempt at having a normal life. He even tries a couple of times to stalk young girls, knowing full well that he is being watched, and that any slightest infraction would send him back to prison on a permanent basis.

I say you want to hate Walter (I sure did), but Kevin Bacon shells out the despised cliche's of the sex offender mentality so well that even if you do hate Walter as a person, you admire him as an acting achievement. On top of that, the circumstances of Walter's new life set him up to become sort of an anti-hero. He's interrupted during one of his hunts, and reports himself to his psychiatrist (Michael Shannon from last issue's Take Shelter, younger, farther from the camera, and a bit out of focus), saying that (as a Pinocchio of sorts) he just wants to be normal; to see, talk to, and be around young girls without having sexual feelings about them. I realize the growing nose/erection parallelism, but again, let us move on.

I guess we are going in a fairy tale direction after all. During detective Def's first visit, he says "we don't have enough Woodsmen in this world." And as The Woodsman progresses, we see Walter becoming, by virtue of his circumstances and his quiet desire to change himself, a title character (a Woodsman, that is), assaulting a fellow pedophile on the hunt, whom he dubs "Candy" (as in, what kids should never take from strangers), and even stopping himself, by film's end, from molesting a girl--back to fairy tales, folks--with a red hoodie he meets in the woods, who brings him face-to-face with the consequences of his actions for the first time in his life. Mirror, Mirror on the wall....

The Woodsman went by too quickly for me and, like a lot of indie dramas, didn't seem to end at the end. But watching Bacon and Sedgewick (as a co-worker of Walter's) bring their real-life romance to a screen of any size added to the authenticity of the whole production, and seeing Bacon's Walter come to a spiritual resolution far outweighed the lack of a literal resolution.

B+

Next issue brings the unofficial prequel to The King's Speech. Stay tuned, Ticketholders, because W.E. are not amused.