The Sessions (2012)

The Sessions (2012)

3/4

   I'm a bit of a sucker for these kind of redemptive stories. When done with honesty and not with the sole intent of tugging at your heart-strings, the stories can be incredibly rewarding experiences. In this case the characters include a man trapped in an iron lung, a professional sex-surrogate, and a priest. Not exactly three characters you'd expect on a roster.

   John Hawkes plays Mark O'Brien, the man trapped in the iron lung. The Sessions is his story, but not in the way you'd expect. His ultimate goal is to lose his virginity. What is so refreshing about The Sessions is that it doesn't try to lay a manipulative hand on the story. For the most part it's an incredibly honest portrayal of a man in Mark's position. The interactions between Mark and Cheryl (Helen Hunt) are comfortable and natural, it's not hard to relate to these characters who, while maintaining a professional relationship can't help but see past those barriers. The Sessions never becomes about the physical bodies but about the sounds, the words, the expressions. This is a story about people.

  Hunt and Hawkes are fantastic. Hawkes is seemingly great in everything and he deserved and Oscar nomination for this role. Hawkes is more than convincing as a man trapped in an iron-lung, and he makes his struggles and successes palpable. As he develops his relationship with Cheryl, we feel for the both of them. We're only given snippets of their lives outside of The Sessions (Mark is obviously given a lot more freedom to open up the story) but we can feel their emotions growing. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for William H. Macy's character Father Brendan. It's not so much the acting of Macy that takes away from the film, but the whole setup of his scenes. There is never a natural chemistry like there is between Mark and Cheryl, Macy's scenes clearly seem scripted and it takes away from the easy flow of the story. It's easy to see why the filmmakers wanted to include Macy's character, but the story could have easily done without. I would have loved to see more interaction between Cheryl and Mark, or even more Mark's interaction with some other characters near the beginning when discussing sex and pleasure. There's a lot more interesting material that could have been traversed,

  It's not perfect, but it's more than just an entertaining 90-minutes. It has real heart and it knows how to reach its audience. As a redemptive story it's more than a welcome inclusion and simply for the interaction between Hunt and Hawkes its worth the investment of time.