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The Wool Cap
[audio:woolcap.mp3|titles=The Wool Cap Movie Review|artists=Christian St John]
A couple of years ago I saw the brilliant made-for-TV movie Door to Door starring William H Macy and ever since I have been a fan of his. In The Wool Cap, another emotionally charged TV movie, Macy (Wild Hogs, Cellular), plays a mute called Charles Gigot, and again proves that he is one of the best, though somewhat under-rated actors in Hollywood today. In fact, Macy gives his best performance to date in this movie, and doesn’t even say a word.
The movie begins on a bleak note – Gigot is the superintendent of a slummy, inner city apartment building, whiling away his days doing menial chores like fixing broken water pipes and taking out the trash. He lives in the basement of the building, an apartment that can only be described as a few steps up from the street. All this plays into why, at the beginning of the movie, Gigot is as gruff as his surroundings.
Then into his life a ray of light begins to shine in the form of a young girl who is left with him by her drug-addicted mother. The movie then follows their relationship as it develops from gruff speechless man and scared young girl, to them having a father-daughter bond.
I don’t know Macy’s own convictions and beliefs, but this movie has one of the best scenes of forgiveness captured in any movie, and definitely gives a nod towards God being the only true source of complete forgiveness. The bottom line message I got from The Wool Cap is that, no matter how grim life may sometimes seem, life is ours to change and that, through love and friendship, we can redeem and improve our lives.
If someone else had acted in and written this (Macy also wrote the screenplay based on the movie “Gigot” starring and written by Jackie Gleason) this could have easily have turned out to have been a deeply depressing, and maybe even disturbing movie, but Macy brings it home with one of the warmest movies I have seen in a long time.
Christian St John
January, 2009
