The Sessions
Director: Ben Lewin
Year Released: 2012
Rating: 3.0
A journalist and poet (John Hawkes), confined to an iron lung since childhood due to polio, realizes at 38 he needs to know what romantic love is all about, so with the go-ahead from an empathetic priest (William H. Macy) he enlists the help of a patient sex surrogate (Helen Hunt) to 'teach' him, in his debilitated state, what a woman's body feels like. It's an out-of-character performance by Hawkes - generally relegated to seedy roles - in what amounts to a celebration of sexuality and the physical: even the Catholic Church with its archaic rules for society has to give the Hawkes character a pass in wanting to feel physical delight even in his crippled state. Unfortunately, it does little in developing the storyline with Hunt, her mostly tolerant husband (Adam Arkin) and son and her eventual conversation to Judaism, and there isn't enough there to form a strong correlation with the largely Christian subtext.
