Sexual Healing: The Sessions Breathes New Life Into Oft-Avoided Subject
Sex and the disabled may still be a difficult topic to some, but at the movies it’s a hot-button theme whose time has come, with numerous examples of candor on film. The Sessions, a wonderful movie with splendid performances by John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, as well as a careful and sensitive screenplay and flawless direction by writer-director Ben Lewin, is the best movie about the pain, ecstasy and life-enriching courage of a handicapped person that I have seen since Jon Voight’s Oscar-winning work in Coming Home. Put aside all reservations. You will love this movie and go away from it informed, enlightened and positive about the sustaining power of the human experience.
This is the true story of Mark O’Brien, a Berkeley poet and journalist who was paralyzed by polio at the age of six and confined to a horizontal position in an iron lung for 32 years. The movie focuses on his terrified but determined decision, at age 38, to lose his virginity before he dies. Read More
