TO SURROGATE, WITH LOVE

Here's a pair of gems, both playing here in the Valley, that I only caught up with recently…

Stricken with polio as a child, the poet and essayist Mark O’Brien spent most of his 49 years in an iron lung. He was the subject of the Oscar-winning 1996 documentary short Breathing Lessons (viewable here). Now, with The Sessions, his efforts to claim a satisfying sexuality, with the help of a sex surrogate, have gotten the full feature treatment from writer-director Ben Lewin (a polio survivor himself).

It’s a film of charming sweetness and easygoing wit, built around superb performances. John Hawkes, in another demonstration of his phenomenal range, is luminous as O’Brien, utterly convincing in his depiction of the man’s disability and vulnerability, but also of his indomitable spirit. The performance is both a technical tour de force and a blast of star quality.

Helen Hunt is no less a knockout as the surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, with her gentle, comically frayed aplomb and her undercurrent of admiration for her client. Then there’s Moon Bloodgood as O’Brien’s unflappable aide, and William H. Macy, terrific as his priest, who gives O’Brien’s project the green light on behalf of the Church. Alas, this means listening to O’Brien’s accounts of it, and glumly reflecting on the unspoken irony that the guy in the iron lung has a better sex life than his.

Ben Affleck is one of those high-profile celebrities about whom it was fashionably decided, at some point, that he was a douchebag and a joke, fit only for ridicule. If this had not been the case, if he were judged only on the merits of his three films as a director—Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo—what would his reputation be? I think that he would already have been hailed as the best, or at least most promising, director of suspense movies since at least Costa-Gavras, if not Hitchcock himself.

Argo, now in theatres, is a dramatization of the CIA operation to extract from Tehran the six Americans who escaped the US Embassy before it was overrun by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979, and thus were not among the 52 hostages that were held there for 444 days. It’s essentially a caper movie about stealing people instead of diamonds or whatever.

The agent who designed and conducted the caper, a man named Tony Mendez (Affleck), concocted a bizarrely over-elaborate-seeming cover story in which he and the hostages, who had taken refuge at the home of the Canadian Ambassador to Iran (Victor Garber), masqueraded as filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, called Argo.

From his crisply-edited, scary opening sequence—the Embassy takeover—on, Affleck’s step as director seems entirely sure-footed. Obvious liberties are taken in several sequences, especially toward the end, for the sake of eminent peril and hairbreadth escape, and one could argue the necessity of taking the movie so far into old-school melodrama. But the success with which Affleck executes these flourishes is spectacular: The suspense is excruciating, though it’s also nicely leavened by comedy, both from the sour, mordant CIA guys—Bryan Cranston is at his best as Affleck’s boss—and, more broadly, from Alan Arkin and John Goodman as a baggy-pants team of Hollywood cronies helping Affleck fake the production (Goodman plays real-life makeup man John Chambers, the Oscar-winner behind the Planet of the Apes effects).

As for Affleck’s own haunted, low-key presence in the star part here, Argo suggests that not only is he a superb director, but that he’s better in front of the camera when he’s also behind the camera.

RIP to Susan Luckey, a hoot as Mayor Shinn’s daughter in The Music Man, passed on at 74. Ye gods, she was cute…