Okita Shuichi’s The Woodsman and the Rain opens in a mountain forest, where a 60-year-old lumberjack (Yakusho Koji) is cutting down a large tree. Many a director would have used a series of short cuts or even a stunt double to spare his middle-aged star effort and danger. Instead, helmer Okita Shuichi shows us Yakusho working hard (with real beads of sweat to prove it) and standing close by the tree as it comes crashing down.
All of which indicates that the character is the real working-man deal and that both Yakusho and Okita will go above and beyond the call of duty to make Woodsman extraordinary, which they proceed to do.
The story, however, is less about elderly derring-do, more about an unusual culture clash and its consequences, from the funny to the teary. Okita tells it with a dry, but never cynical, eye as well as a finely balanced blend of true-life observation and story-telling craft.
Soon after the lumberjack, Katsuhiko, noisily fells his tree, he is approached by a nervous assistant director (Furutachi Kanji) who tells him a film is shooting nearby and asks him to quiet down. This request doesn’t immediately register on Katsuhiko’s puzzled brain (film crews being as common as space aliens in his neck of the woods), but he is soon drafted into helping the outsiders, who know little more about their location than they can find on Google Maps.
More seriously, the tyro director of this trashy zombie pic, Koichi (Oguri Shun), has been struck nearly dumb with fear and indecision, while his cast and crew regard him with barely disguised contempt. What can the reluctant Katsuhiko, who knows nothing about movies, but likes playing one of the living dead extras, do to help?
The answer involves several improbabilities that Okita, Yakusho and Oguri (who directed his own debut feature, the 2010 Surely Someday) seamlessly work into comic and dramatic gold.
This is not to say that their film is slick; in fact, like Okita’s previous feature, the scrumptious foodie dramady The Chef of South Polar (2010), it’s on the slow, even dreamy, side. But, as exemplified by the tree-felling scene, it firmly grounds even its screwiest scenes in the real world (if you consider a film set ‘real’).
It also exerts an intimate emotion tug not usually seen in local zero-to-hero dramadies, with their big, walloping finales. Katsuhiko not only comes to regard Koichi as a surrogate son, but his on-set experiences make him regard his real son (Kora Kengo), a slacker nearly the same age as Koichi, with new eyes, in a scene guaranteed to make your own mist up.
Yakusho once again demonstrates that he is the most versatile and adaptable of Japanese actors, playing his working-class hero with unforced authority and surprising agility. (He strides up mountains as though he has been doing it all his life — or spending months on the Stairmaster.) Meanwhile, Oguri disguises the ikemen (pretty boy) looks that won him millions of female fans on hit TV dramas like Hana yori Dango (Boys Over Flowers).
Most of all, Woodsman glows with a deep love of the movies, even ones with ridiculous zombie holocausts. As Katsuhiko reminds us, his eyes shining as he reads Koichi’s script, there’s a magic to telling stories for the camera that anyone can understand, even if they’ve spent their lives in forests instead in front of screens.
Few other young Japanese filmmakers have captured that magic with Okita’s quiet power.
Mark Schilling