The Sessions [HD]

A Bold And Entertaining Movie Featuring Two Of The Year's Best Performances
After making a splash at this year's Sundance film festival, the provocatively themed "The Sessions" has created a fair amount of buzz both for its subject matter and for its performances. Based on the true story of Mark O'Brien, the movie tackles a topic that might make some uncomfortable--sex, specifically sex and the disabled. In an era where any amount of violence and gore is perfectly acceptable, I still don't understand why it is verboten for American movies to deal with sexual issues in a frank and adult manner. So I appreciate that writer/director Ben Lewin made "The Sessions" with a matter-of-fact boldness uncommon in today's movies. The movie is frank, explicit, and both emotionally and physically revealing. Instead of feeling unnecessarily prurient, however, the movie is surprisingly life affirming. It is sensitive about its topic, but also quite humorous. I was afraid the film might be a little too clinical, depressing or dispassionate but it is, instead, eminently...

"But the truth is, we're just human."
The Sessions is an extraordinary little indie film based on an even more extraordinary true story. In 1988, Mark O'Brien, a thirty-eight year old poet, journalist and advocate for the disabled living in Berkeley, California, decided to lose his virginity. This may not sound very extraordinary unless you know that O'Brien, severely afflicted by polio as a child, had spent most of his life in an iron lung and was unable to move any part of his body below the neck.

O'Brien's decision was prompted as a result of research he was doing for an article on the sex lives of disabled people. After interviewing a number of disabled people, and seeing how many of them were in fact enjoying an active and rewarding sex life in spite of their disabilities, O'Brien began to consider his own sex life, or rather, his complete lack of one, and how he might go about changing that. The issue was further complicated for O'Brien by the fact that he was a devout Catholic and what he was...

A Burdensome Virginity
How do you lose your virginity if you have been confined to an iron lung most of your life? A couple of years ago, I had some lively discussions on this topic with one of my JayFlix friends, a health-care professional who was attending a young quadriplegic. Now this film-festival favorite addresses the question, only this man isn't paralyzed with no physical sensations, instead he is a polio survivor confined to an iron lung since childhood. Furthermore, he is a witty, well-educated and frustrated adult.

Based on the real-life story of Mark O'Brien (1949-1999), a Berkeley poet and journalist, he was the first severely disabled student to graduate from college, earning a bachelor's degree in 1982, and acceptance to a post graduate program. His inspiring story has been told once before in a documentary film, "Breathing Lessons," directed by Jessica Yu. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 1997. This version is written and directed by the acclaimed Ben Lewin,...

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