Five stars. Rating: R, for strong sexuality, graphic nudity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.16.12
Berkeley-based poet, author and
journalist Mark O’Brien died in 1999, just shy of his 50th birthday. His
collections of poetry included Love and Baseball and Breathing, and he wrote
essays, book reviews and features for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner,
the National Catholic Reporter and numerous other outlets.
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| Having progressed through the early stages of gentle physical contact, Cheryl (Helen Hunt) decides that Mark (John Hawkes) is ready for the next step. But Mark is terrified, remembering too many humiliations resulting from his frail, polio-disfigured body. |
His commentaries were broadcast
by National Public Radio, and — two years before his death — he also co-founded
a small press dubbed Lemonade Factory.
Most notably, O’Brien was an
inspirational figure in the blossoming late-20th century movement to encourage
disabled people to lead independent lives. He contracted polio at the age of 6;
the disease left him paralyzed from the neck down, and able to control only
three muscles: one in his right foot, one in his neck and one in his jaw. He
spent most of his adult life in an iron lung, able to “escape” only for brief
intervals.
He initially dictated his works
to attendants, then typed them with a mouth stick.
Born in Boston and raised in
Sacramento, O’Brien moved to Berkeley in 1978, when he was accepted as a freshman
at UC Berkeley. He graduated in 1982, then — after initially being turned down
— was admitted to Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. By then, he was a
familiar fixture in Berkeley, charging about the streets in a Stanford-built
electric gurney that he controlled — badly — with his left foot. Because of the
way his spine had been curved by polio, he never was able to sit up in a
conventional wheelchair.
Writer/director Ben Lewin’s
remarkable film, The Sessions, opens with some vintage KPIX Channel 5 Eyewitness News footage of O’Brien, as he navigates city streets and the UC
Berkeley campus. The editing is coy; we’re never quite able to see O’Brien’s
face, and as a result there’s no disconnect when this dramatized story opens in
his apartment, as a cat enters an open window one bright, sunny morning and
uses its tail to tickle Mark’s face into wakefulness, his body cocooned by the
iron lung.
Of course, Mark can’t scratch the
resulting itch. The moment is both mildly tragic and unexpectedly amusing, the
latter in great part because of the passion actor John Hawkes puts into Mark’s
effort to “will” the itch away.
