The Sessions

The Sessions is a movie about the sexual life of a severely disabled man, and it's full of frank talk and full frontal nudity.  Amazingly, director/writer Ben Lewtin has still managed to create a wholesome-feeling entertainment that audience members of almost any age will be able to enjoy.  The conventions of the Sundance-winning indie movie have a way of making this type of potentially off-putting material as palatable as vanilla frozen yogurt, and while vanilla frozen yogurt isn’t my favorite thing in the world, I can’t deny that I enjoy a spoonful or two every now and again.

The fictionalized film isn't as compelling as the actual story of the writer Mark O’Brian, who was also the subject of the 1997 documentary short Breathing Lessons, and a much more challenging and interesting movie about him could probably have been made, but The Sessions still has a lot to recommend it, especially John Hawkes’s lead performance. Hawkes has been amazing in films like Martha Marcy May Marlene and Winters Bone; in which his characters were as dark and heavy as he is light and funny in this picture. Mark O’Brian is the kind of role that often feels like Oscar bait, but Hawkes's performance never feels actorly or award-seeking.

I always enjoy watching Helen Hunt, even though she’s never convinced me that she actually is any of the people that she plays; she’s more of a welcome screen presence than a great actress. Her nude scenes in this film feel natural and honest – unlike, say, Anne Hathaway’s in Ed Zwick’s terrible Love and Other Drugs from 2010. One can always tell the difference between unclothed appearances that feel like the positioning of the actor, length and composition of the shots, and frequency of body parts have been gone over by a team of lawyers before the cameras rolled vs. ones that feel authentic to a scene. The former distract the audience from the human drama on screen and play like ploys for attracting the Academy's attention, the latter allow the audience to remain firmly grounded in the perspective of the two characters. Hellen Hunt did get an Oscar nomination for this roll--and ironically lost to Anne Hathaway (for a role where she did not take her close off)--but Hunt's nomination, I think, was due to the strength of her performance, rather than her boldness in doing the nudity. Everything about Hellen Hunt’s performance in this picture is natural and authentic with the exception of her Boston accent-- I still don't understand why actors always feel they need to do this accents when playing someone from Boston?

The Sessions is not a film that stays with you, like My Left Foot or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, but it is a touching and enjoyable picture about real human beings.