KEVIN BACON was walking along a Caribbean beach just before Christmas 2002 when he was accosted by a man claiming to be the friend of a friend. The man said he was in real estate and had been offered an opportunity to invest in a film: would the actor read the script and give him his opinion?
“Now I‘ve got to tell you,” says Bacon, peering sceptically through tinted spectacles. “I don’t normally do that kind of thing. But it was practically Christmas. I was on a beach and feeling good, so what the hell.” The script duly arrived, via Bacon’s agent, and the actor dutifully complied. He paged through The Woodsman with growing alarm: not only did it read very well, but he knew that he would be perfect for the lead. The problem was that the character of Walter is a convicted paedophile, just released after 12 years in prison. The really big problem: Walter did it.
“It was exactly what I did not want to do,” says Bacon. “I didn’t want to do another dark picture. I was set to do Mystic River and I wanted to lighten things up. I had done a number of bad guys in a row.”
He passed the script to his wife, the actress Kyra Sedgwick. “Kyra said: ‘Kevin, you have to do this’.” Less than 13 months later The Woodsman had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival to rapturous critical reaction and earned a slot in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes this year. It is now set to be one of the talking points at this year’s Times bfi London Film Festival.
Advertisement
Twenty-five years in the business, Bacon, 46, is seen as a strong secondary role, as a kind of dramatic glue that holds the audience’s attention when the action shifts from the lead. Although he established his career playing rebels — the spoilt rich kid in Diner, the star-turn in Footloose — his filmography over the past 15 years has tended to the dark side because despite, or perhaps because of, his preternaturally youthful face, he does nasty better than anyone. He is the guy you love to hate in such films as A Few Good Men and The River Wild.
Strong lead roles are few and far between. The Woodsman was something else. “It’s worse than murder,” says Bacon. “In a prison, who’s the first person the inmates will turn on? The child molester. Nothing upsets people more. And as a society we refer to these people as monsters. To present the man, that was the challenge.” One of many challenges; getting into Sundance and Cannes were two steps on a path that can only get steeper.
Charlize Theron’s role as a prostitute in Monster won her an Academy Award. But Aileen Wuornos was merely a serial killer. In terms of cinema’s taboos, paedophilia is the final frontier. Not that the subject hasn’t been broached. Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M was probably the first, and Bacon himself played a child molester in Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, but never with lines like this: “Robin, would you like to sit on my lap?”
The title of The Woodsman refers to the hero of the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, the woodsman who cuts open the stomach of the wolf to free the child within. The little girl springs out unscathed.
“There are no woodsmen in this world,” says the cop assigned to monitor Walter during his parole, before complaining: “Why do they let freaks like you out just so that we have to come and catch you again.”
Advertisement
It’s a widely held sentiment and one of several ironies that the film exposes: Walter is no freak. The prevalence of child sexual abuse in Western society is shocking — 34 per cent of sexual assault victims in America were under the age of 12, according to the 2000 US Bureau of Justice statistics — yet it remains a taboo subject. At the same time, we are bombarded with images of precocious sexuality. Walter is a pariah in the film not because he has molested little girls but because he was caught molesting little girls.
Sedgwick is cast opposite Bacon as a co-worker who is attracted to him before she learns of his crimes. The scene where she learns the truth is one of the film’s most powerful. While they are in bed together, she prods him for details of his past. He has been dreading this inevitable moment so he deflects it. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” he asks her. She complies. She slept with her best friend’s husband, destroying both the marriage and the friendship. Then it’s Walter’s turn. He doesn’t look at her. “I molested little girls.” She bursts out laughing.
Sedgwick says of the scene: “That’s the way life works. She just can’t conceive that that’s the truth. It’s just so out there.”
The film is a marvel of economy and restraint, without a gratuitous moment; all the more marvellous because it’s the debut feature of a young American film-maker, Nicole Kassell, who co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Fechter, based on his play. Like Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, the film allows the audience to sympathise with a pariah but it never offers exoneration. The tension in The Woodsman comes from the potential for abuse, as Walter struggles to control his proclivity, and our innate desire for a fallen man to escape the cycle of recidivism. Bacon’s performance is immensely sympathetic, but he balks at the term.
“I don’t like the word ‘sympathetic’ in acting. We weren’t trying to make him sympathetic as much as to make him a real character. To me the most frightening thing is that they are not monsters, they are human beings, sitting on the bus next to you, your neighbour.”
Advertisement
At the beginning Walter is in denial — “it’s not what you think. I didn’t hurt those girls” — and he resists the probing and prodding of his court- appointed therapist. But through the course of the therapy and the film he (and the viewer) come to understand that the reason Walter’s sister doesn’t want to see him is not because she is ashamed to have a paedophile for a brother, or that she is afraid he will prey on her daughter. It’s because Walter’s sister was his first victim. The force of revelation is crushing.
Asked if one scene was more difficult than any other, Bacon reflects for a moment. “Most actors don’t like to admit it but you can usually look at a shooting script and say, ‘OK, this day looks pretty tough, it’s got some action, but tomorrow looks easy, I’ve just got to drink a cup of coffee and kiss the girl.’ On this film that didn’t happen. Every day was hard. Every moment of this man’s life is full of shame.”
He pauses. “There is just so much shame.”
Advertisement
The Woodsman is shown on Oct 30. Kevin Bacon gives a Times Screen Talk on Oct 31
CONTROVERSIAL FESTIVAL ENTRIES
A HOLE IN MY HEART
This in-your-face rumination on homophobia and societal dehumanisation from Lukas Moodysson (Together, Lilja 4-ever) is set in an amateur pornographer’s flat. It has already caused walkouts at the Toronto Film Festival.
Advertisement
MA MÈRE
The unspoken sexual tension between mother and son intensifies in this incest drama starring Isabelle Huppert, whose earlier film The Piano Teacher was equally unsettling. Director Christophe Honoré has freely admitted that his script draws on the work of the controversial British playwright Sarah Kane.
MYSTERIOUS SKIN
American indie film-maker Gregg Araki offers the often unsettling, emotionally charged coming-of-age tale of two boys whose lives steer in opposite directions after one summer when, as eight-year-olds, they were molested by a baseball coach. Years later, as teenagers, one has buried the truth with the belief that he was abducted by aliens while the other has become a gay hustler.
PALINDROMES
The latest from provocative director Todd Solondz (Happiness) weaves deadpan humour into the story of Aviva, a 13-year-old American girl desperate to get pregnant and her subsequent flight from home after being forced to have an abortion. Half a dozen young actors (all shapes, colours and sizes) as well as Jennifer Jason Leigh play Aviva as the film turns into a surreal odyssey.