Mad about polio

Helen Hunt, FTW.

If you’ve been reading my reviews, you’ll know that I tend to dislike movies about people with disabilities, maladies, or unfortunate circumstances overcoming their problems, usually with swells of mediocre music and a cheap plea for tears. It’s not that I don’t like seeing people succeed when the odds are more likely that they’ll fail; rather it’s that the movies are usually obvious and formulaic.

I don’t like knowing the ending of the movie before the opening credits are finished. And that’s just one of the reasons I did like The Sessions, which focuses on a man who suffered severe polio as a child and was left unable to move any of his muscles below his neck. By the end of the credits, we know that despite having to spend most of his life in an iron lung and unable to move, he graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English and was a working poet and journalist.

So, now what? He wants to have sex. Continue…