19 October 2012 7:30 AM, PDT | Vulture | See recent Vulture news »
The newest disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait picture is The Sessions, and it’s quirky and grounded enough to sneak past your more cynical defenses — the kind that would lead you, say, to label it a disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait picture. Two things make you sit up, the first being that its 38-year-old Berkeley protagonist, Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes), cannot: Paralyzed below the neck from childhood polio and almost never raised to a sitting position, he is largely seen at a 90-degree angle — which creates, interestingly, a kind of poetic distance. The pathos isn’t in-your-face. The second novel element is, in fact, the focus. Where other disability films ignore or dance around the question of how their subjects, as the Brits so delicately say, “manage it,” The Sessions dances right in. It’s a sexual coming-of-age movie. The original title was The Surrogate for its chief female character, Cheryl Cohen Greene (Helen Hunt »
- David Edelstein
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