The Sessions

Overview

In an early scene in The Sessions, Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), cocooned in an iron lung, unable to move a single part of his body, has a cat brush its tail against his nose. With no-one around, he has no way to scratch that tiny yet inevitably all-consuming itch. He lies awake through the night.

It's a scene that ensures we know exactly how he feels as his character embarks on his arc in the film — seeing a professional sex surrogate, Cheryl (Helen Hunt), who initiates him into how and what it means to have sexual contact with another person. The Sessions is based on the memoirs of the very real Mark O'Brien, a journalist and poet who was paralysed from the neck down by a childhood bout of polio. His is a form of paralysis that means he can't move his body but his body can feel touch; it's just that he's lived to 38 without finding a person inclined to touch him in a way that's non-medical.

The Sessions is a wonder of a film, and don't let any hesitations you might have about it being tough going or generally a bit icky keep you from seeing it for yourself. Aussie quiet achiever Ben Lewin writes and directs this incredibly warm, funny, brilliantly un-mawkish movie that is not at all shy about sex and yet kind of weirdly fun for the whole family.

Many separate factors had to come together to pull this off: the frank, sassy voice of Mark, interpreted by Lewin; the totally invested performance from Martha Marcy May Marlene actor Hawkes; the illusorily relaxed performance by Hunt, whose almost entire screen time in spent in these sex 'sessions'; and the vivid presence of the supporting cast, who make you want to know them beyond their intersections with Mark (look out for a sweet cameo from Hawkes' Deadwood co-star Robin Weigert, barely recognisable outside of her Calamity Jane get-up).

The charm of the peripheral characters suffers a drought around Cheryl's side of the family, apparently to give her reason — more than she needs — to fall for Mark just as he surely falls for her. Conversely, it reaches its peak in the form of Father Brendan (William H. Macy). Mark is a devout Catholic, see, and it's The Sessions' clever conceit that his confessions should take the place of standard narration. The shaggy-haired (read: open-minded) priest is forced to take a more pragmatic position on sex around his new congregant, who is soon torturing him with lyrical descriptions of corporeal pleasures precluded to a man of the cloth.

The presence of the priest also hints at another important point about The Sessions, which is that it's not just about disability and sex but also about all of us and sex. The religious and social dogmas that feed into how we think about sex are many and varied, and for those for whom these beliefs and behaviours create an obstacle to sex, it's a little, everyday tragedy. Because what The Sessions communicates above all is the pure, joyous, silly pleasure of sex and the unique ways it bonds two people partaking in it.