The Woodsman

excellent review by James Bowman :

In The Woodsman, apparently somebody?s idea of a Christmas movie, Kevin Bacon plays a pedophile named Walter who has just been released from jail after serving a 12-year sentence for molesting little girls. Walter repeatedly asks his psychiatrist (Michael Shannon) with what I take to be intended as poignant longing, "When will I be normal?" But as both Kinsey and this movie show, he already is normal, at least in Hollywood?s terms. He would not be presented to us as the sympathetic character he is here ? a sad ex-con trying to go straight and being persecuted by his work-mates when they find out his history ? if the film-makers didn't see him as being firmly on the continuum of normality which, for our Kinseyite culture, extends to all but the most extreme perversions, and perhaps even there. For once morality has been medicalized and the process of treating bad people as sick people is well underway, there is no obvious place for it to stop. We are not meant to approve of what Walter has done, but neither are we meant to see it as putting him beyond the pale of decent society.