A highly educated paralyzed man living with the help of an iron lung seeks the services of a sex therapist and a priest, the details of which are documented in The Sessions. Cheryl Cohen-Greene (played by a taut-faced Helen Hunt) is the sexual surrogate who helps Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes) have his first sexual experience. Helen Hunt approaches her role with unselfsconscious directness. Maybe because she doesn't need to act sexy, she is free to be naked without pretense. Mark's main goal is to have sex - to both receive and give pleasure, and once this is achieved, the sessions end - though neither participant escapes without some entanglement. Though both sexual surrogacy and prostitution eschew the formation of relationships, surrogacy in this case does well to break that rule albeit haltingly and in a very limited way.
In The Master - Freddie Quell, (Joaquin Phoenix) is a violent sociopath with a creative flair for alcoholic concoctions who meets an L.Ron Hubbard-ish new age guru Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his band of true believers; goes through programming designed to defuse his hair-trigger temper, his sexual repression and his creative boozing with medicine cabinet staples and paint thinner. Joaquin Phoenix is scary-good, and scary period. He lost an incredible amount of weight to play this role and he seems to disappear into it as into the folds of his baggy pants. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams are the husband and wife team. He plays it straight, and she plays it even straighter than he does, calling into question the method's ability to cure all ills - specifically Freddie's.
The movie careens from one altercation to the next, and we do not get the sense that all the programming has done any good until, in the closing scene, Freddie is finally able to be with woman - apparently in a whole and honest way.
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