Kristin Reviews The Sessions

Upon reading the premise for The Sessions, I pegged it as a definite Oscar nomination contender. It has everything the Academy loves: disabled people overcoming limitations, disabled people who are also artists, disabled people with questionable life expectancies . . . It’s also based on a true story, approaches sex in a tasteful and honest way, and contains full frontal nudity.

Because it contains all of these things, I still expect some Academy members to overlook the fact that film is not actually very good and nominate it anyway. Which is too bad, because it doesn’t deserve it.

The Sessions stars John Hawkes as Mark O’Brien, a poet who lost the use of his muscles due to polio when he was a child. O’Brien lived his life trapped in an iron lung, with regular short (two to three hours at a time) forays out into the world with a portable respirator. In his late 30s, O’Brien wanted to experience sexual intimacy and hired a sex surrogate (played by Helen Hunt in the film) to help him lose his virginity. This story, by itself, is touching, and it saddens me to think about how lonely and difficult much of O’Brien’s life must have been.

The Sessions should have resonated with emotional depth. I mean, the premise alone is enough to tug at the proverbial heartstrings. So when one and a half hours of movie failed to tug, the disappointment wasn’t just the standard disappointment in a poorly crafted movie - it was disappointment that the filmmakers failed to do justice to O’Brien’s story.

To begin with, Helen Hunt does not possess the talent to take on a role like this. Between her inconsistent and grating effort to speak with a Boston accent and her habit of delivering all of her lines with the same vocal inflection, she was a glaring weak link in an otherwise decent cast.

John Hawkes, who is capable of exuding almost tangible charisma and intensity in the right role seems to be empty in this one. Not that he isn’t believable. I accepted that he was unable to move and struggling with Mark O’Brien’s issues. But something critical was missing. I never felt connected to O’Brien. I never really felt anything.

And that was the problem. It felt as if the screenwriter, Ben Lewin, who also directed, assumed people would connect to O’Brien simply because he was disabled. Character development was tossed aside, not only for the main character, but for all those with whom he interacted. O’Brien’s priest (played by William H. Macy in his new, comfortable but unremarkable long-haired Macy persona) and assistants, who were prominent figures throughout, were like stand-ins for characters - we never learned anything about them, so we never attached to them either. Facts about O’Brien’s life were revealed, often through the sex surrogate’s recordings of her sessions with him, but they felt like encyclopedia entries rather than character revelations.

The Sessons should have been one of those movies about triumph in the face of great obstacles that the Academy loves. The recipe had all the ingredients, but somehow in Lewin’s hands, its soul got left out.

Kristin
11.22.2012