The Sessions, starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt. Opens Friday, Oct. 26th.
The Sessions (Grade: A), director Ben Lewin, a Fox Searchlight release
Having completed it’s brief, and celebrated, run at the 31st annual Vancouver International International Film Festival, Ben Lewin’s moving, incredibly touching, and laugh-out-loud funny Sundance Audience Award winner opens this coming Friday, certain of it’s place in the Oscar firmament, as both one of the best films of the year, and much-deserved Oscar material, for 2010 Oscar nominee, John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone; Marcy, Martha, May, Marlene), and 1998 Oscar winner, Helen Hunt (As Good as It Gets), who in 2012 set the standard for actor-driven cinema.
William H. Macy adds to an already first-rate cast, playing priest Father Brendan, who empathizes with Mark (Hawkes), the disabled, virginal 38-year-old writer on whom the story is based, acting as the guide who unofficially sanctions his journey to sexual liberation, the narrative at the heart of the film. Macy’s determined attempt to remain impassive while Mark gives Father Brendan more details than he needs is nothing short of a thing of beauty (which is not to imply that The Sessions is more explicit than it need be, just human scale and humane). Vulnerable, witty, self-lacerating, charming and erudite, Hawkes gives an entirely convincing portrayal of a man that is all at once emotional, spiritual, physical, pleasurable, soul-
satisfying and life-affirming. Hunt, meanwhile, turns herself and her body into an instrument for healing, the best work the actress has done since her 1992’s The Waterdance. A decent, disarming, lovely and wonderful film.
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God. Opens Nov. 16th, 2012.
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God, dir., Alex Gibney
Variety’s Justin Chang writes …
Weaving a devastating account of priestly pedophilia into an excoriating indictment of the entire Vatican power structure, Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s meticulously researched, hard-hitting documentary focuses on the chilling testimony of the film subjects’ experiences and the horrific scope of the personal and institutional corruption that damaged their lives. Gibney digs deep into the case of Lawrence Murphy, a priest alleged to have abused more than 200 boys while teaching at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee from 1950-74. Four alumni — Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Pat Kuehn and Arthur Budzinski — recall in sign language about how Murphy repeatedly molested them well into their teenage years, painting an angry picture of how their disability rendered them especially vulnerable to the misdeeds of a trusted church leader.
A thoroughly damning portrait an arrogant, unfeeling institution that sees its authority as absolute, invoking canon law in order to hush up scandals and excommunicate those who would bring the truth to light, showing greater mercy toward its perpetrators than toward those who suffered at their hands, Mea Maxima Culpa reserves its most withering attack for the Vatican itself, advancing an exhaustively detailed argument that (current sitting) Pope Benedict XVI is the single most knowledgeable figure on the Church’s history of sexual abuse, yet has done little to reach out to victims or to bring violators to justice.
Meanwhile, reporting from the London Film Festival, In Contention’s Guy Lodge suggests that Mea Maxima Culpa may well emerge as the winner at next February’s Oscar ceremony. Screen Daily critic Anthony Kaufman writes, “Mea Maxima Culpa — which translates as ‘my most grievous fault’ in Latin — presents a well-constructed and poignant argument, full of outrage and ample evidence, about the heinous crimes and cover-ups that have taken place in the Catholic Church. Or as Rev. Thomas Doyle, a Catholic lawyer, chillingly notes in the film, it’s “far worse than a conspiracy; it’s a policy of secrecy.” As noted above, Mea Maxima Culpa opens Nov. 16th.
