Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Runtime: 118 minutes
Rooting an entire movie in the perspective of a 5 year old is one hell of a risk, which is why director Lenny Abrahamson and his collaborators deserve countless hosannas. Last appearing with the oddball music dramedy Frank, Abrahamson has taken a gigantic leap forward with Room, working off of Emma Donoghue's adaptation of her own novel. Both a tense psychological drama and a moving mother/son, Room finds Abrahamson graduating to a whole new level as a director.
Like most kids, 5 year old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) loves when his birthday rolls around. He eats cake, gets extra attention from his mom, and gets to feel like the center of the universe. But the center of Jack's universe is terrifyingly small. All of his life, Ma (Brie Larson) has told him that Room - a soundproofed shack with only a skylight for light - is the entire world. Outside of Room is space, and then beyond that is heaven. Dogs and cats and other people, the ones the pair see on their TV, don't really exist. Ma's behavior would sound disturbing and cult-ish were it not for the fact that her placement in Room was anything but voluntary. Her lessons about the worlds outside of Room may be lies, but they are lies told out of love, in order to keep the awful truth at bay. There isn't much in Room, but at least mother and son have each other while cramped inside their four walls.
Even with a first half set almost entirely in a single space, Abrahamson shows remarkable dexterity behind the camera. Working with cinematographer Danny Cohen, he turns Room into a visually dynamic space. The camera moves and swings, and at times captures space at angles that make everything appear much bigger. The Room may not be big to us (or to Ma), but it's literally the entire world to Jacob, and Abrahamson and Cohen do a striking job of conveying this notion. The grim reality remains at the fringes, but is only palpable when Ma is significantly present in a shot.
Young Mr. Tremblay is effortlessly believable in his role, neither grating nor overly coached. He never hits a false note, and Abrahamson ought to be commended for guiding the young actor through some tricky material. Having the film so strictly grounded in his mindset pays off in spades. Jack is allowed to be both our window into Room's world, while also functioning as a protagonist with agency. W.C. Fields is famously quoted as saying, "Never work with children or animals," but Tremblay makes a compelling case as evidence to the contrary.
Meanwhile, Larson adds another wrenching performance to her resume as Ma. She plays the character's complexities with great restraint, keeping one on edge as to what her next move will be. Ma loves Jack, but she's also an adult who has had her life irrevocably altered, even if a day comes when she can escape from Room. Despite a few disappearances during the story, Room is just as much about Ma's shattered psyche as it is about Jack's experiences with the world (both the one he knows, and beyond). Room is about emotional imprisonment, but it spends just as much time dealing with recovery from trauma, which is hardly an easy journey.
Despite the eventual appearance of the outside world, Room remains anchored in Tremblay and Larson's beautiful performances. Under Abrahamson's watch, their story never gets lost even as the scope of the narrative widens. Room puts the bonds of mother and child through the wringer, but always with tasteful distance. Abrahamson and Donoghue present some harsh realities and harsh questions, but their concern for their characters mirrors Ma's treatment Jack: sometimes it's abrasive, but it ultimately comes from a place of profoundly moving love that refuses to be shaken.
Grade: A-
Director: Ben Lewin
Runtime: 95 minutes
Being billed as "The Festival Hit of the Year" puts a lot of expectations on a movie. And, as is often the case, festival darlings often underwhelm once viewed in the broader context outside of the festival environment. Unfortunately, Ben Lewins' The Sessions is the rule, rather than the exception. A nicely made and touching film, The Sessions never probes its characters' motivations or backstories enough to achieve a resonance deeper than its modest-to-a-fault narrative.
Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) has spent almost his entire life trapped in an iron lung after contracting polio. Having successfully completed college, Mark has spent his post-grad years as an aspiring poet, constantly tended to by wave after wave of assistants. As illustrated by the film's opening act, in which Mark professes his love for an assistant who then abandons him, Mark's existence is a lonely one. Mark's life changes when two new people enter his life: new assistant Vera (Moon Bloodgood), and priest Fr. Brendan (William H Macy). Confiding in both Vera and Fr. Brendan, Mark confesses that he feels his time is running short and that he finally wants to experience sex with a woman. It's not long until Mark is referred to sex therapist Cheryl (Helen Hunt), who agrees to work with him.
Of course, there's a catch. Cheryl is only allowed to have six sessions with a client. It's the type of set up that could devolve into a forced framing device. Thankfully, Lewin (who wrote the script, itself based on a true story), ignores the temptation, lets Mark's journey unfold naturally. Some of the most effective moments come when Mark's sessions are juxtaposed with Mark's conversations with Fr. Brendan, as he talks about his latest experiences. There's an organic nature to Mark's story that benefits the film greatly, and allows it to work as a story with real people in it rather than a maudlin exploitation of one man's trials and tribulations.
The Sessions is the second film this year that has taken a look at intimacy among a marginalized group on the silver screen. At Cannes there was Michael Haneke's unflinchingly brilliant Amour (which begins opening in the US in December), which looked at the love between an elderly couple as one of them falls into increasingly ill health. Amour is certainly not a crowd-pleaser, but it manages to be sensitive to its subject matter and still be deeply moving, albeit in a reserved manner. By contrast, The Sessions is a much more accessible film, even as it deals with its own uncomfortable topic (sex among the disabled). Lewin's film functions more as a drama/comedy than as a grim-faced drama. That's certainly not a bad thing. The sense of humor comes through nicely in a number of scenes, and prevents the film from being a dull slog through Mark's struggles.
Lewin is also aided by the nice work from his cast. Hawkes and Hunt have a nice doctor-patient chemistry that feels well thought-out. Hunt in particular gets to shine as her feelings about Mark become more complicated. But even though the film's focal point is Mark and Cheryl's sessions, but other relationships succeed as well, including Mark's interactions with Vera (a surprisingly enjoyable character). Bloodgood plays Vera like a more mature, less sardonic version of Aubrey Plaza's April Ludgate. Despite her reserved nature, Vera is the one who forces Mark to go to his first session with Cheryl even as he has last minute doubts. She may be his assistant, but that doesn't mean she's just going to bend to his every whim just because he says so. Macy's Fr. Brendan is less successful, despite the humor mined from his encounters with Mark. Whereas Mark and Cheryl's are driven by nicely realized interactions, some of Fr. Brendan's scenes feel a little stiff, as though Lewin isn't entirely sure how to use their encounters to enhance the film's ideas.
And it's in the ideas department where The Sessions comes undone. Though the film builds to a quietly touching ending, there's the overwhelming sense that it could have been a much richer work. Though the titular sessions reveal some of Mark's past, they do little to explore what it means in the bigger picture. The most we get from Mark about his desire to experience sex is that it will make him feel like a fully realized man. Yet there's never any connection to Mark's past or his relationship with his parents or his faith to give his desire more weight. The problem is relatively similar for Cheryl. There's no real exploration as to how or why she became a sex therapist (other than a joking line about how she stopped being religious because of her love of sex). There's also very little examination of how Cheryl feels about her work, and how she deals with being a sex therapist and also a wife and mother. Mark and Cheryl's sessions may register, but they only do so at the shallow end of the spectrum.
As such, The Sessions is little more than a "nice" movie that does a "nice" job of tackling tricky subject matter. Lewin deserves praise for dealing with the material with such maturity, but it's a shame that he didn't also go into greater depth. All that's left is a film undone by its own niceness, one that exists as a pleasant and affecting enough viewing experience that fades shortly after you exit the theater.
Grade: C+
