Clever camera angles play down John Hawkes‘ enormous wide honker in the new dramedy The Sessions, hence playing up Hawkes’ resemblance to Robert Downey, Jr., which is of course part of director/writers Ben Lewin‘s game plan. As polio victim Mark O’Brien, who’s down (on a gurney) but not out, Hawkes has a naturalistic game to play and plays it through. We know this is a Hollywood version of naturalism because we never see Hawkes having to go to the bathroom and none of his attendants ever lose their shit at the nice man who’s paralyzed from the neck down.
The sex surrogate chosen to relieve Mark of his virginity is played by Helen Hunt, who got boldly naked for a paralyzed man twenty years ago in The Waterdance and goes considerably futher skin-wise here. We know this is a Hollywood movie because “boldly” means we get to see every inch of Helen Hunt, while we never see John Hawkes below the very top of the groin, hence preserving a time-honored double standard involving the penis as the final taboo. The movie makes warmly comic hay out of the societal fixation on penile vaginal penetration as the one true sex, hence setting up Mark O’Brien’s hangups as well as reinforcing them as long-held societal hangups. But in a movie set in Berkeley, you’d hope for more questioning of authority. Even authority of ideas.
I don’t mean to sound entirely grumpy at this film. Hawkes and and Hunt seem so utterly plausible as implausible people that they deserve all the praise; it’s three for three if you add William H. Macy as a priest who actually makes Catholicism seem warm and non-condemning.
I do recommend O’Brien’s original autobiographical article, which you’ll find here, and which gives a story messier, sadder, and more oddly touching than Lewin’s screenplay. O’Brien confesses his anxieties, his sexual disappointments in body, mind, and spirit–but also his urge to recite Shakespeare to his surrogate. “Our culture values youth, health, and good looks, along with instant solutions,” he quite rightly writes, “… I fear getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and loved. For this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time and life that I have wasted.” The film could have put some more of that in its pipe to smoke.
As a final aside, I’ll mention that O’Brien died on the Fourth of July, 1999, age 49, after a life and career filled with grunting frustration and poetic insight. His surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, is still alive and practicing, although she’s lucky enough to live in an area where surrogacy is approved of.
