Old Yorker

  • The Sessions

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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.

  • The September Issue

    Old YorkerFilm review

    R J Cutler (2009)

    Watching the Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in operation in this fly-on-the-wall documentary, I was struck increasingly by her determination to be decisive for the sake of it – or for the sake of exerting her unquestionable authority.   We may be meant to assume that her lightning-fast brain, combined with unerring instincts for what looks good, means that Wintour’s instant pronouncements on clothes and photographs are infallible but I kept wondering why she didn’t sometimes take a little longer to make up her mind.  She seems so hellbent on getting her own way that she has to express an opinion immediately, and dare her staff on American Vogue or the contributing designers or photographers to contradict her, and hardly any of them dare to.  (The men are much worse:  whereas some of the women appear to be keeping a lid on what they really feel, all of Wintour’s male colleagues look to be helplessly, cravenly admiring of her.)  When, a few days before the copy deadline for Vogue’s September 2007 issue, it’s decided that a last-minute reshoot is needed, you want to feel vindicated – except that it then also occurs to you that this kind of eleventh hour urgency is probably necessary to Wintour, as a means of maintaining her nervous energy levels and, once the challenge has been met, making her feel she’s gained yet another victory.  During the closing credits, there’s a final bit of interview with Wintour, when she’s asked to name her greatest strength.  ‘Decisiveness,’ she says – without, of course, a moment’s hesitation.   She reminds you of people you know who express rapidly contradictory opinions with complete certainty.  The U-turn doesn’t matter – if you’ve been unequivocal twice you’ve been doubly decisive.

    Just about all I knew of Anna Wintour before seeing The September Issue was that she was the inspiration for the Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada, written by Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger.  (I also knew she was the daughter of Charles Wintour, once editor of the London Evening Standard.  By coincidence, we watched The September Issue on the day of Alexander McQueen’s death.  One of those paying tribute to McQueen was Alexandra Shulman, now the editor of British Vogue, and whose father Milton was the Standard‘s theatre critic for years, including the years when Charles Wintour was its editor.)  It’s slightly odd seeing the real thing on screen three years after Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly.  The Devil Wears Prada (as a screenplay anyway) is too thin for it be worth the actress playing Miranda’s attempting to suggest a real person:  Streep’s characterisation is a brilliant distillation of the qualities associated with a tyrannical career woman.  Her ice queen Miranda is much more likeable than Anna Wintour, and not just because of the pleasure we take in Meryl Streep’s performance.   It’s the seemingly humanising characteristics of Wintour – her passing attempts at kittenishness or when she smiles or even giggles – that make her all the more alienating (and humourless).  Her phenomenal professional success doesn’t make her an inevitably fascinating personality.  After a while, it’s the discrepancy between how unremarkable she is to watch and listen to and the power she wields that becomes one of the main points of interest of The September Issue.

    Another point of interest is Grace Coddington, the former cover girl who is now the creative director for US Vogue and who at one stage threatens to take over this documentary.  She talks about the passion she developed for the world of fashion, and Vogue in particular, as a convent schoolgirl in Anglesey in the 1950s.   She’s strikingly and very individually beautiful in the photographs we see of her as one of the leading models of the next decade.  In her mid-sixties (she was born in 1941), she still looks amazing – with her pale skin, mass of auburn hair and simple, usually black clothes – even if she’s unrecognisable from her younger self.  A car crash in which she sustained serious facial injuries, including damage to her left eye, led to Coddington’s starting a new career as a fashion editor.  (The development of her afterlife in the industry could be compared with the afterlives of great ballet dancers who grow into leading teachers of the next generations of dancers.)  In The September Issue, she is the only person who will stand up to Anna Wintour and the creative conflicts between them are the dramatic motor of the film.  R J Cutler – best known until now for The War Room, the documentary about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign – needs this because, although the film is meant to build as the copy deadline looms, it’s not particularly suspenseful.  (You assume throughout that the September 2007 Vogue came out OK.)    There are moments when you sense that Grace Coddington sees this film as an opportunity to express her frustrations and The September Issue is certainly structured so that her artistic choices are vindicated as emphatically as possible.  The complicity between Cutler and Coddington is sealed in the moment when, during the urgent reshoot, she has the inspiration of using the director and his camera in a photograph with a model.

    There are a few glimmers of vulnerability and self-doubt when Anna Wintour talks about her family, especially when she suggests that her three siblings are ‘amused’ by her line of work.  (Her brothers are a senior figure in British local government and the political editor of The Guardian; her sister is deputy general secretary of an international public services organisation, based in Geneva .)   When she talks about her father, there’s even a suggestion of real affection – absent from the sequences in which we see Wintour with her daughter Bee (who wants to be a lawyer).  Cutler’s question about Wintour’s greatest strength during the closing credits is followed, of course, by, ‘What is your weakness?’  She clearly thinks that her answer – ‘My children’ – is clever and charming  but it may be more revealing than she intends:  you get the feeling that part of Wintour does see this kind of emotional attachment as undermining.  The little that she has to say by way of an apologia for her vocation is disappointing.  She either seems to miss the point (perhaps deliberately) of many people’s hostility to the world of fashion or is banal (I assume unintentionally).  She starts by insisting that being crazy about fashion products doesn’t mean that you’re brainless.   She elides the distinction between fashion industry professionals and readers of Vogue but whoever thinks either group is necessarily stupid anyway?  (Isn’t it more the case that fashionistas are annoying because they may well be smart and gifted – but devote themselves to what comes across as a self-absorbed and essentially shallow universe?)  Near the end of The September Issue, Wintour can’t manage anything better than ‘Fashion is never about looking back.  It’s always about looking forward’.

    Still, her own foresight is clearly regarded as a major factor in the commercial success that Vogue has enjoyed under her leadership:  Grace Coddington is not the only person interviewed here who tells us that Wintour was way ahead of her time in seeing ‘the celebrity thing coming’.  Sienna Miller, who is to be the cover face of the September 2007 issue, illustrates how the fashion world generates as well makes use of celebrities:  I think more fashion magazine readers than filmgoers would be able to recognise her.  Given the way she treats most people around here, Wintour seems deferential in the presence – or even at the thought of – celebrity.  Roger Federer has appeared in Vogue and Wintour sounds like a reverent teenager when she asks Mario Testino, ‘Did you see Roger’s match yesterday?’ (I guess the 2007 Wimbledon final:  the curt, cross-sounding response – ‘No – I know he won’ – put me off Testino instantly as it made him sound like a Nadal man.)  To be fair, Wintour may be expressing awe at something greater than celebrity in Federer’s case:  it seems she is a genuine tennis fan (and player:  the last question over the closing credits is ‘What would be your greatest gift?’ and she replies, ‘A better backhand’).

    Cutler interviews Wintour very gently (perhaps that was part of the deal for the film to get made).  I wish he had asked her or even one of her acolytes to explain what I can never get clear about the relationship between the artistic and commercial missions of the world of high fashion.  I don’t have a problem either with people spending their money on clothes and accessories – or with fashion designers regarding themselves as creative decorators of beautiful human faces and bodies.  What I don’t get is the boast heard in this film that one out of every ten American women will buy the Vogue September issue and the implication that they’ll do this to keep up to date with what they should be aspiring to wear – when most of the clothes are designed for the catwalk or for magazine pages but not for life outside them.   We see a fashion shoot in Rome , where the city’s architectural glories are appropriated as backgrounds to the models in Testino’s photographs.  This seems typical of the Vogue sensibility – an art based on ephemerality doing what it likes with art that was built to last.  The effrontery, like it or not, is remarkable but it would have been good to know what the Vogue supremacy felt about the artistic ethics of it.

    11 February 2010

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