Ben Lewin (2012)
A dramatisation of the life of Mark O’Brien – a journalist, poet and polio victim who, from the age of six, spent virtually all his time in an iron lung. At the age of thirty-eight, O’Brien (who died eleven years later, in 1999) hired a sex surrogate called Cheryl Cohen Greene to help him lose his virginity. O’Brien wrote an article ‘On Seeing a Sex Surrogate’ in 1990 in the light of this experience. In 1995, a biographical film about him by Jessica Yu, Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien, won a Best Documentary Short Oscar. Now Ben Lewin, himself a polio survivor, has adapted ‘On Seeing a Sex Surrogate’ into a dramatic feature. The Sessions, with John Hawkes as Mark and Helen Hunt as Cheryl, has already been a big festival hit – I saw it at the London Film Festival, at a screening attended by Hawkes, Hunt and Lewin. It’ll be surprising if this doesn’t translate into decent box-office and Oscar nominations – both would be well deserved. The Sessions is an unusually witty and glancing disability movie even if it’s not in the class of My Left Foot. (By coincidence, Daniel Day Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln looks likely to be the one to deny John Hawkes an Academy Award for his performance here.[1])
A few elements of the film suggest a conventional approach to the material. There’s nice, twinkly music by Marco Beltrami. Mark sees in his mind’s eye a scene from his childhood – as he ran along a windswept beach with his sister, before he was struck down with polio and she died (in an accident caused, Mark guiltily thinks, by their mother needing to give all her attention to him). At his eventual funeral service, we see smiling through orchestrated tears all three of the women whom the film shows having at least a strong emotional attachment to him. When things get serious between Mark and Cheryl (as they must), he writes her a poem; her husband (Adam Arkin) opens the envelope and throws the poem in the trash, fuelling a row with his wife. She gets up when he’s asleep to retrieve the missive from the dustbin (it’s conveniently accessible) – because a love poem is something to be read in the romantic still of the night rather than in the heat of an argument. But these relative weaknesses detract hardly at all from the many strengths of The Sessions – and there are compensations to the beach memory and Mark’s death anyway. The former doesn’t occur naturally; Mark evokes it in response to Cheryl’s advice during one of their sex therapy sessions. And his dying comes as something of a shock if you’ve not heard of or read up on the real Mark O’Brien beforehand. His voiceover (judiciously rationed by Lewin) announces simply that he met Susan (Robin Weigert), the woman with whom he had a relationship after Cheryl, ‘ten years before I died’. Until this point, I hadn’t realised Mark’s narrative kinship with Lester Burnham in American Beauty.
John Hawkes’ performance is so involving that you do just about forget it’s a performance (yet you never stop admiring it). There aren’t many actors likely to be as physically credible in this role as the worryingly skinny Hawkes. What he conveys in his voice and his face is a fusion of arrested development and piercing frustration with the savage limits placed on Mark’s desires. There is something childlike about Mark – a quality of being stuck at the age of six not only in the sense that he’s been physically paralysed from the neck downwards since then. An important part of his Catholic faith is, as he says, being able to blame someone for his situation; but he looks at the picture of the Virgin Mary in his home with feelings of bashful reverence as well as ironic reprehension. Mark’s taste for what he calls at one point ‘rakish, sophisticated’ shirts illustrates the thwarted man that he also is – and Hawkes is very funny throughout: painfully funny is the operative phrase because you come to see that Mark’s wit has to be relentless to keep his misery tamped down. I don’t know how much of the credit goes to Ben Lewin and how much to Mark O’Brien but the dialogue is unusually good – each of the characters has an individual voice but without their lines being used as an obvious short cut to explaining who they are. The people in this movie develop believably and unspectacularly. For example, one of Mark’s carers, a thirtyish woman called Vera (Moon Bloodgood), is unforthcoming when she starts in the job. You think her unsmiling taciturnity is going to be a joke but she gradually becomes warmer and funny in a different way.
Helen Hunt has had an odd career. For a couple of years after As Good As It Gets, she seemed to be the first choice in Hollywood for more leading roles than were good for her. In the last decade she’s more or less disappeared from view. Her specialty is to give apparently unremarkable women an elusive, a slightly mysterious distinctiveness. Cheryl does and doesn’t come into that category: she’s attractive – with an air of anxious melancholy about her. As a sex surrogate, however, she’s extraordinary. Helen Hunt gets Cheryl’s affable professional manner precisely. She also spends a good deal of the film completely unclothed. This has its uncomfortable aspect, for this viewer anyway – not because Hunt doesn’t look good but because it seemed to me that Ben Lewin was, in effect, exploiting her able-bodiedness. The Sessions puts the sexuality of a disabled man in the foreground but the shots of the unclothed Mark are necessarily less revealing than those of the naked Cheryl: John Hawkes’ body hasn’t been twisted by polio, and this isn’t a film to use technology to suggest otherwise. Cheryl decides to convert to her husband’s Judaism and that involves stripping naked too – as she bares all, the elderly woman who initiates her (Rhea Perlman) commends Cheryl on her uninhibitedness. Helen Hunt deserves similar praise but her repeated nakedness is hard to ignore and tends almost to obscure how fine her acting is. As in her other good work – in As Good As It Gets and Pay It Forward – she’s emotionally alert and fine-tuned and, when the relationship with Mark starts to mean too much to Cheryl and they decide to stop the six sessions of the treatment after number four, touching too.
Ben Lewin builds up a network of other people who aren’t getting sex. There are a couple of nice conversations between Vera and a clerk (Ming Lo), in the motel Mark and Cheryl go to for their most successful sessions. The bedroom activity between Cheryl and her husband is limited. Most conspicuously (and in the film’s broadest comedy), Mark goes regularly to his parish priest for what starts as confession. After a while, Mark says he wants to talk with Father Brendan as a friend rather than a priest but William H Macy’s controlled wistfulness is a continuing reminder of the constraints imposed by his calling. The Sessions is carefully cast and very well acted throughout. Those in smaller roles include Annika Marks as the other young woman Mark takes a shine to (and who reciprocates), Rusty Schwimmer as an unlovely nurse he gets rid of, and W Earl Brown as another of his carers, who pronounces sex as ‘overrated but necessary’.
16 October 2012
[1] Afternote: In the event, John Hawkes wasn’t even nominated for the Best Actor Oscar.