Sex surrogacy is my calling!

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:30:00 +0000

Standing outside the theater doors, Cheryl Cohen Greene, who inspired Helen Hunt's Oscar-nominated role in "The Sessions," leaned in and told me in a hushed tone, "I've watched it 11 times and I cry every time." Just feet away, an audience sat in the dark, watching the Hollywood version of her life -- or at least her experience working as a sex surrogate with severely disabled poet Mark O'Brien -- unfold on the big screen.

Cohen Greene and I were at Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, Calif., the city where the movie takes place, for a Fox-sponsored screening ahead of this year's Academy Awards. It was our first time meeting but, having watched the movie, I felt like I already knew her. Hunt nailed Cohen Greene's Boston accent, not to mention her radiant warmth and penetrating gaze. In real life, as on-screen via Hunt, she brings an immediate, disarming intimacy to even clothed conversation. In fact, standing there in the theater lobby with her, I felt a bit naked.

“The Sessions”: Is this unlikely sex fable Oscar-bound?

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:18:00 +0000

What’s the connection between sex and romantic love, and how well does it work when we try to decouple the two? That question, in dramatic form, goes back at least as far as the invention of romantic comedy during the later Renaissance, and very likely all the way back to the first time two simians did the deed and started thinking about it too hard afterward. Both the strength and the weakness, I would say, of writer-director Ben Lewin’s intimate drama “The Sessions” come from the way it recasts that hoary question in a specific contemporary context.

Previously known as “Six Sessions” and before that as “The Surrogate,” this movie was a breakout hit at Sundance back in January, largely because of the brave and commanding performances of John Hawkes and Helen Hunt. It’s based, as they say, on a true story, though one should always be leery of that. Hawkes plays Mark O’Brien, a poet and journalist who has been severely disabled by childhood polio but decides, at age 36, that he wants to lose his virginity – after a whole lifetime, as he puts it, when people have only touched his body when they had to, in order to bathe or dress him. Hunt plays Cheryl Cohen Green, the professional sex surrogate – yes, that’s different from a prostitute, as she calmly explains -- whose job is to help him accomplish that goal.

Salon.com > Helen Hunt

Sex surrogacy is my calling!

“The Sessions”: Is this unlikely sex fable Oscar-bound?