Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE SESSIONS” My rating: A (Opening Nov. 9 at the )

95 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“My penis speaks to me.”

Mark O’Brien, a devout but conflicted Roman Catholic, is confessing to his parish priest.  

Mark  has been paralyzed from the neck down ever since contracting polio as a child. He spends all but three or four hours of every day in an iron lung and can only go to church by being strapped onto a gurney pushed by one of his care-givers.

Mark can feel his body, he just can’t move it. And now, at age 38, he’s determined to finally have sex with a woman.

“I’m getting close to my ‘use by’ date,” he explains, introducing his plan to hire a sex surrogate to take his virginity.

Mark O’Brien (1950-1999) has already been the subjects of an Oscar-winning documentary, 1997’s “Breathing Lessons.”

“The Sessions” takes a fictional approach to a particular aspect of O’Brien’s life, and in tackling an eyebrow-raising situation with humor, compassion and insight writer/director Ben Lewin has given us a film less about disabilities than about the human condition.

(Lewin, a veteran of nearly 40 years in television and documentaries, knows of which he speaks. He gets around on crutches, the result of his own boyhood brush with polio).

Mark is played by John Hawkes, who was so effective a couple of years back as a coiled-spring Ozarks meth head in “Winter’s Bone.” Here he cannot act with his body at all, spending most of the movie flat on his back and unmoving.

William H. Macy

Yet this is as full and vibrant a performance as you’ll see on film this year, an insightful study of a guy who refuses to feel sorry for himself and meets daily indignities with devastating self-deprecatory humor.

His situation is so compelling, and his fundamental desire so human, that even the befuddled Father Brendan (William H. Macy, also excellent) concludes that God might approve of this case of adultery: “In my heart I feel He’ll give you a free pass on this one.”

There’s something terribly heartening in how the people in Mark’s life band together to see his wish come true.

His caregivers (Moon Bloodgood, W. Earl Brown) wheel him to “sex sessions” in the handicap-friendly house of a friend (Jennifer Kumiyama, an actress born with arthrogryposis, a condition that severly limits the use of the limbs).

There Mark is met by Cheryl, a wife and mother who specializes in providing sex to handicapped men.

Cheryl is played by Helen Hunt who, though casually nude in about half her scenes, establishes such an atmosphere of professionalism and light-hearted compassion that “The Sessions” becomes the least salacious movie ever about  losing one’s virginity.

It’s not overreaching to describe Cheryl’s approach to her work as borderline spiritual. And by nailing that aspect of the job Hunt (like Hawkes, a shoo-in for an Oscar nom) sends  “The Sessions” rocketing into the emotional stratosphere.

Prepare to laugh a lot.  But bring Kleenex just in case.

| Robert W. Butler