Mr. Woodcock

The protagonist’s name, Farley, awkwardly invokes the Farrelly brothers, whose names we would not have been surprised to see on this film, an association that the screenwriter may have hoped to create in the mind of readers back when this project was in its early stages.

The antagonist’s name, Woodcock, suggests indefatigable machismo, i.e. in a battle of masculine stamina, you can’t compete with a wood cock. A wood cock won’t get tired or soft, it hurts, and is unaffected by, what it penetrates. The fat boy turned self-help guru (Farley, read: eternal adolescent) must face the fact that the overwhelming masculine force that dominated him in his childhood isn’t going away; he must contend with it again as an adult.

This is an Oedipal comedy. Woodcock is a father figure, both in the sense that he was the dominant
masculine force in Farley’s formative years, and in the sense that he is now married to Farley’s mother. Farley, coming home from a book tour (read: living on the energy of his newfound adult strength as his own man) finds his mother married to the gym teacher that tormented him (read: the pseudo-father whom Farley thought he had escaped from has now reasserted his father-ness by becoming an actual stepfather). Farley and Woodcock proceed to compete in masculine arenas; wrestling and working out. If Farley can find a way to defeat Woodcock, he will effectively "kill" the suppressive "father" in his own psyche, allowing him to feel like a real man.

It’s significant that the mother is played by Susan Sarandon, whose sexual appeal seems not to diminish as she gets older. The good mother is still sexy, the bad father is still virile; therefore there is still a chance that the son’s rise to alpha-male status is only temporary, or perhaps has always been illusory.

The appeal of a story with such powerful archetypes is that everyone intuitively understands them. We all have our Mr. Woodcock, whether it’s a person or a thing. We have all won major battles that we secretly fear are not really over. The one brief moment in the trailer where we see Farley physically overpowering Woodcock is a calculated tease. What’s really being sold here is the opportunity to work through one’s own Oedipal conflict without having to actually get out of one’s chair.

Mr. Woodcock trailer