YMMV / The Sessions

• Adorkable: Mark is a sweet, endearingly awkward guy who Thinks Like a Romance Novel and maintains a good sense of humor in spite of the difficult hand he’s been dealt in his life.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: The film's depiction of Cheryl—is she really the self-assured and independent woman she presents herself as being, or is she more of a Stepford Smiler who uses breezy positivity to avoid confronting the legitimate problems in her personal life? Her experiences with Mark cause her more emotional uncertainty than you'd expect in someone who is Happily Married, yet she's also willing to convert to a new religion just to please her husband and her mother-in-law.
• Award Snub: John Hawkes missed out on an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, in what was widely considered to be one of the most shocking oversights of the 2012-13 awards season. He did, however, win Best Male Lead at the Independent Spirit Awards, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Drama at the Golden Globes.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The movie where Helen Hunt does a zillion nude scenes...and also some stuff about a disabled guy. To be fair, a well-established Hollywood actress like Hunt showing this much skin in a work that's at least mainstream-adjacent is pretty noteworthy—there's a reason why her nudity even gets a mention on her entry at The Other Wiki.
• Critical Dissonance: Not quite an Acclaimed Flop, but close. The film had an excellent festival run and was almost universally hailed by critics, who praised its sense of humor and the performances of its two leads in particular; however, general audiences glanced at the plot summary—and the content warnings—and quickly deemed it Oscar Bait with a particularly Audience-Alienating Premise. While those who actually saw the movie tended to have positive reactions, it only made around ten million dollars in total (respectable enough in light of its $1m budget, but less so when taking into account the fact that Fox Searchlight had paid an uncommonly high $6m for the distribution rights).
• Informed Wrongness: Josh, Cheryl's husband, throws Mark's love poem in the trash before Cheryl gets a chance to read it. The film seems to be presenting this as evidence that he's an insensitive, controlling Jerkass who is envious of Cheryl's connection with Mark. However, Cheryl's desire to read the poem blatantly violates her own protocol of not becoming emotionally involved with her clients, so Josh's decision to intervene before things got out of hand isn't all that unreasonable.
• Narm:
  • Cheryl's instructions to Mark during their first successful attempt at intercourse:
    Cheryl: Breathe—slowly—and think of something delicious...
  • The mikvah lady’s rather Anvilicious speech to Cheryl about the importance of body positivity—particularly since it’s difficult to see why someone like Cheryl would need any lecturing on the topic, though this may just be her falling into the standard lecture she gives to her usual first-time clients.
    Mikvah lady: This is your body. This is the body that God crafted for you.
• Nightmare Fuel: A power outage in Mark's house leaves his iron lung, which he needs in order to breathe for more than a few hours at a time, completely non-functional. Things go from bad to worse when he accidentally drops his only means of phoning for help onto the floor, out of his reach. Essentially, all he can do at that point is hold out hope that one of his caretakers will remember to help him, because if not, he will be dead by morning.
• Spiritual Successor: To 1992's The Waterdance, another film in which a character played by Helen Hunt engages in a sexual relationship with a physically handicapped man. Hunt has said that she's drawn to stories about the sexuality of disabled people due to her dislike for the Idealized Sex commonly shown onscreen.
• Superfluous Solo: Rather than exploring Mark’s relationship with his new partner Susan in a meaningful way, the film instead chooses to devote two of its final minutes to a subplot concerning Cheryl’s conversion to Judaism, which seems to exist mainly for the purpose of squeezing in a Captain Obvious Aesop about loving one's body (see Narm above), as well as providing Cheryl with a bit more screen time prior to her appearance at the Curtain Call of Mark’s funeral. And also giving her yet another opportunity to get naked, as Helen Hunt drops a bathrobe, shows full rear and full-frontal nudity, and in doing so demonstrates that there may actually be such a thing as fanservice fatigue.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: With its overtly sexual themes and many, many shots of its leading actress' bare body, the movie more than earns its R rating. However, Helen Hunt herself has voiced a desire for teenagers as young as fourteen to watch it as a healthy, judgement-free introduction to sex and sexuality.

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