Humanizing a face of evil

For storytellers in search of irredeemable fiends, pedophiles have been irresistible villains. They have impelled the action in works ranging from “The Alienist” to “Mystic River,” triggering revenge tales, police pursuits and emotional scenes.

But a new crop of creative works is leading pop culture’s evil incarnate in a noticeably different direction. Rather than use people who prey on children merely as a one-dimensional plot device, these filmmakers, playwrights and authors are depicting pedophiles as three-dimensional characters who are themselves worth exploring dramatically.

While these fictional characters still commit horrific crimes and pay steep prices for their offenses, they increasingly are being portrayed as ordinary people whose extraordinary problems compel them to carry out heinous acts. Current examples include:

* One of the most heartbreaking characters in the new movie “The Woodsman” may not be a victim of pedophilia but the pedophile himself, a recently paroled sex offender (Kevin Bacon) wrestling with his temptations as he somehow tries to start a new life while working at a lumber mill.

* Audience members at the new Broadway production of “Frozen,” in which a grieving mother arranges a jailhouse encounter with her young daughter’s killer, can find themselves hoping more for reconciliation than retribution when the two finally meet.

* And in Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “Little Children,” a convicted child abuser’s struggles with both his impulses and his caring mother are occasionally as understandable as those of the book’s suburban parents.

“Monsters have horns,” says Bacon, who plays the sex offender Walter in “The Woodsman,” which was shown at the recently concluded Cannes film festival and this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was greeted with equal measures of praise and squeamishness.

“The truth is, [Walter] does not have horns. He is a human being. They are in schools, churches, families. They are friends. These guys are everywhere. So for the sake of the victims, we can’t continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Michael Jackson’s child molestation case and the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophile crisis illustrate how deeply such accusations and admissions of guilt can reverberate and dramatize the public’s and the media’s fascination with the crime. No matter how statistically less prevalent (the number of reported sex abuse cases dropped 40% from 1992 to 2000), pedophilia strikes at the intersection of two deeply emotional issues: childhood safety and sexual urges.

The new pop culture representations reflect research that views pedophiles more as dangerous addicts than unprincipled criminals like bank robbers or car thieves. But even if science is on the side of this different way of storytelling, audiences and cultural gatekeepers may not yet be ready for these kinds of depictions.

“If you are very polarized over the issue, my guess is you will just absolutely reject them and see them as the work of the enemy,” says therapist A.W. Richard Sipe, author of “Sex, Priests and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis.” “But it is a complex issue and has to be dealt with in nuanced forms because in literature and drama is where we grasp reality.”

The Broadway production of “Frozen” is struggling to sell tickets despite passionate reviews and four Tony nominations, and when “The Woodsman” debuted earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, it generated trepidation across Park City, Utah, from potential distributors.

“We thought it would be easy,” says “Woodsman” director and co-writer Nicole Kassell. She notes that her producer Lee Daniels’ previous film, “Monster’s Ball,” won the best actress Oscar for Halle Berry, theoretically calming anxious “Woodsman” buyers. “But absolutely no one would touch it. They really don’t know how to handle these films that are outside the box.” The film will be released in December by Newmarket, among the most daring distributors and the handlers of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”

Hollywood in recent years has shunned stories that cast pedophiles as anything but black-and-white bad guys. Every studio declined to release 1997’s “Lolita,” and the film’s national debut came via cable television. Universal Studios prevented its specialized film division, October Films, from releasing 1998’s “Happiness,” whose characters included a seemingly model father and therapist who sexually abuses his son’s friend (the film eventually was distributed by its producer, Good Machine).

The 2001 independent movie “L.I.E.,” which features a complex, even fleetingly sympathetic pederast, didn’t attract a significant theatrical distributor despite winning numerous film festival awards. And none of the studio-owned specialized film divisions made an aggressive bid to distribute last year’s “Capturing the Friedmans,” a chronicle of how a family is torn apart by an ambiguous sexual abuse case. The documentary, which was released by tiny Magnolia Pictures, performed well in theaters and was nominated for an Oscar.

Any number of people -- foremost among them the victims of pedophiles -- may be repulsed by any creative work that dares to look at a pedophile as anything but a demon. Irish actor Brian O’Byrne said that soon after he agreed to play the pedophile Ralph in “Frozen,” his talent agents dumped him.

Hollywood shies away

Not surprisingly, these new interpretations of pedophilia arrive from far beyond Hollywood’s borders.

The low-budget “Woodsman” was partially financed by rap music mogul Damon Dash. Two other pedophilia-related movies that were shown at the Cannes festival, “Bad Education” “ and “Cronicas,” were made in Spain and Latin America, respectively. “Frozen” comes from British playwright Bryony Lavery.

Even if some of these works show pedophiles in more multifaceted terms, their creators do not shy away from detailing their criminals’ terrible tendencies. The words of the pedophiles themselves can be terrifying, from “The Woodsman’s” molester asking a little girl if she wants to sit on his lap to “Frozen’s” serial killer whispering “Hello” to an offstage child likely to be his next victim.

That said, these new works do reflect what Vladimir Nabokov once wrote about his famous pedophile, “Lolita’s” Humbert Humbert: “There are in his story depths of passion and suffering, patterns of tenderness and distress, that cannot be dismissed by his judges.”

Such “depths of suffering” make up much of Perrotta’s “Little Children.” In a suburban town arrives Ronnie McGorvey, a convicted sex offender who also is suspected in a 9-year-old’s disappearance. One neighbor harasses McGorvey and his mother by writing graffiti and dumping dog excrement on their home. When McGorvey visits a public swimming pool on a sweltering day, families flee the water as if it were infested with sharks.

What makes Perrotta’s characterization of McGorvey distinctive is the pedophile’s relationship with his ever-hopeful mother.

“He’s a parent’s worst nightmare, but we also see him a lot as a child in relation to his mom,” Perrotta says. “I think if you look objectively at what Ronnie says and does in the book, he’s not a very sympathetic guy. But you see him a lot through the eyes of his mother and this desperate hope she has that he can somehow be reformed and live a decent life.”

Furthermore, many of the other adults in “Little Children” are fighting against (and succumbing to) various temptations, from Internet pornography to extramarital affairs. “A lot of people in this book are dealing with what they know to be illicit and deviant desires,” Perrotta says. “And very few have figured out a way to resist them. Ronnie’s problem is that the object of his desire is completely beyond the pale.”

Playwright Lavery partially based her play’s serial child killer, Ralph, on Robert Black, convicted of killing three young British girls and suspected in several other disappearances.

“One of the things that hit me was that Robert Black had such a disjointed and difficult childhood. He seemed to have no affection,” Lavery says. “So I thought, What do we do if a person is so scarred as a child? Do we just give up on the notion of rehabilitation? I don’t think we can do so.

“What I tried to do is make [Ralph] as true as I could imagine him. As a playwright, your task is to pay attention to all of your characters and actually to love them as much as you can: to see all their faults, and all their virtues.”

Rather than throttle the killer, the play’s mother (played by Swoosie Kurtz) shows Ralph childhood pictures of her daughter, including a snapshot of her in a costume contest in which she finished third. “She should have won,” Ralph says tenderly.

Almodovar speaks up

Writer-director Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education” has at its center a pedophile priest whose victim comes back to haunt him. The film doesn’t judge its characters; the fallen priest is played as a tortured, pathetic man who cannot have what he covets.

Almodovar, who says he knew classmates in his Catholic school days who were molested, says he was very careful not to show the crimes being committed, even though many of his previous films have been (and several scenes within “Bad Education” are) sexually explicit. The filmmaker says the pedophilia scenes were not only unnecessary but also unsuitable for young actors to film. “I just could not put them through that,” he says.

Sony Pictures Classics, which will release “Bad Education” in November, says the film will be sold as a tale of internal struggles, not pedophilia. “This movie is as much about child molesters as ‘Talk to Her’ was about rape,” said Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard, referring to Almodovar’s popular Oscar-winning film. “We are going to sell this as an Almodovar movie.”

Dr. Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic says that recent cultural depictions of pedophiles remind him of how alcoholism used to be portrayed before First Lady Betty Ford’s drinking problems became news: The focus was on punishment and stigmatization, not treatment.

“You can’t really punish [pedophilia] away,” Berlin says.

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Munoz reported from Cannes and Horn from Los Angeles.