Touching
THE WOODSMAN
HOTEL RWANDA
DIRECTED BY TERRY GEORGE
IF THERE WERE an Academy of the Underestimated, Kevin Bacon could easily serve as its president. The group's membership should probably include Bacon's wife, Kyra Sedgwick, plus Benjamin Bratt, David Alan Grier, Mos Def and other actors who appear with Bacon in The Woodsman, director-cowriter Nicole Kassell's drama about a convicted child molester adapting to life after prison. It's no visionary masterwork, and there are a couple of characters and moments that are not persuasive. But for the most part, The Woodsman is a remarkable drama, unnervingly precise in what it says and how it chooses to say it.
Somehow managing to combine emotional transparency and even tenderhearted sympathy with the icy distance this explosive material requires, The Woodsman pulls off no small feat. The film's effectiveness rests almost entirely on Bacon's contained but exquisitely detailed lead performance, the supporting players' interaction with that performance, and Kassell's willingness to let her actors carry the weight of the film's meanings while avoiding dummy-proof exposition and speeches whenever possible. (The terse script was cowritten by Stephen Fechter.)
Watching Bacon play Walter, a shattered man consumed with guilt over the harm he caused others-and play it almost entirely without audience-pandering emoting or fussy mannerisms-I experienced a variant of the same reaction I always have while watching Bacon: He's so amazingly good that if you'd never seen him play other characters (the dancing fool in Footloose, for instance, or the haunted homeowner in Stir of Echoes, or the Machiavellian slimebag villain in The River Wild), you might assume this was the only sort of role to which he was ideally suited.
Bacon is surrounded by actors who inspire similar reactions. First among equals is Mos Def, who brings hard intelligence and a righteous streak to Sgt. Lucas, the cop tailing and taunting Walter; Def was equally strong in HBO's Something the Lord Made (about pioneering heart surgeon Viven Thomas) and as the explosives expert in The Italian Job (who was, it must be noted, only half deaf). For fans of intelligent, life-sized acting, The Woodsman is a treasure trove.
While it's set in the present, the movie recalls some of my favorite 70s dramas about fringe characters-not just 1977's Short Eyes, about a child molester trying to survive in prison (incidentally written by playwright Miguel Piñero, whom Bratt portrayed in a 2001 biography), but also Straight Time, The Heartbreak Kid and Who'll Stop the Rain. Like those films, The Woodsman derives much of its strength from close-ups as the characters talk, walk, listen or think-a strategy hipster critics deride as uncinematic, but which has actually been the basis of movie drama (and mass audiences' willingness to get involved in that drama) since the medium's inception.
Kassell augments this simple strategy with smart composition and editing choices, from the freeze-frames in the opening credits (which subtly suggest the idea that one's whole life can change in an instant) to the wide shots that emphasize the hero's smallness (which is not merely a product of his pariah status, but his own ashamed embrace of that status). Midway through the movie is a transition that is, in its modest way, brilliant: After being verbally slapped around by Sgt. Lucas, who considers our hero an irredeemable monster who's likely to strike again, Kassell and her editors cut from a close-up of the stricken Walter to a close-up of a child's face as seen through a school-bus window, just before the bus pulls away. Without words, this tiny moment illustrates Walter's fierce, mostly hidden struggle to control his compulsion-to shield himself from it (as if placing it under glass) and push away from it (like the bus pulling away from the viewer).
The drama's weak link is the character of Vickie, Walter's coworker at the lumberyard and eventual girlfriend. Sedgwick does yeoman's work in the role; she's earthy and tough, but not as tough as she thinks-qualities Sedwick also displayed as the abused waitress in Personal Velocity. Her character is too vague, too much the obligatory lover and confession-taker. There are other problems as well, but they're minor compared with the film's substantial accomplishments. The Woodsman is moving without trying too hard to be moving. It engages the heart and the mind, and invites us to understand Walter without judging him; it displays qualities of mercy that aren't strained, a rare achievement.
SPEAKING OF VERSATILE ACTORS: Don Cheadle, who gets a rare chance to play a heroic leading man in Hotel Rwanda. Like The Woodsman, this is no visionary picture. But unlike The Woodsman, it doesn't compensate with keenly chosen, emotionally intuitive filmmaking choices.
Like Ray, Beyond the Sea, The Sea Inside and other recent biopics of varying quality, this one's a fairly prosaic, straightforward docudrama: hero goes here, hero does this, hero goes there, hero does that. Its impact resonates not because of the filmmaking, nor even for the movie's central performance (Cheadle is good here, but not as soul-stirring as he was in HBO's A Lesson Before Dying). It resonates because the subject matter (Cheadle's Hutu hotel owner shields his Tutsi wife and her relatives and countrymen from genocide) is so powerful that it's hard to imagine anyone not being moved by it.
Schindler's List and Amistad, to name just two obvious models for Hotel Rwanda, had big subjects, too, and acquired a certain innate power because of them. But Spielberg exponentially increased that power (in the violent scenes especially) through expressive and sometimes metaphorical filmmaking. (In List, think of machine-gun flashes lighting up the Krakow ghetto in long shot; in Amistad, think of the close-ups of slave chains unspooling as slavemasters toss their cargo overboard.) Director Terry George shoots in the super-wide 2:35:1 aspect ratio, but he displays no great compositional intelligence; the widescreen format seems to have been chosen because it subconsciously tells audiences, "You're watching an epic," and because it allows George to pack more actors into every shot.
Cheadle is elegant, crafty and empathetic as Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel owner who risks torture and murder by helping persecuted people. Joaquin Phoenix has some smart moments as a news cameraman-particularly a scene in a hotel bar where he asks patrons if they're Hutu or Tutsi, an arbitrary physical distinction created by the nation's Belgian colonizers; upon discovering that two women drinking at the bar are, respectively, Hutu and Tutsi, he exclaims that they could be twins, even though their bone structure isn't even remotely similar. And there are several scenes of stomach-churning brutality, made at once more abstract and more universal by George's decision to present them in long shot. While PG-friendly, the strategy recalls Polanski's The Piano, which heightened our awareness of violence's social repercussions by showing it at a distance, then concentrating on observers' reactions to it.
But this movie is not as transformative, nor as moving, as it should have been. It's a pretty good movie on a great subject.