Surprisingly upbeat and quite moving, this is based on the true story of Mark O'Brien, a polio victim mostly confined to an iron lung, who has sessions with a sex surrogate to lose his virginity at age 36. There's a lot of Oscar buzz on this for John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, both of whom were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards today. O'Brien published On Seeing a Sex Surrogate four years later (1990) in The Sun magazine (you can read the entire article here, but there are a few spoilers and it's explicit). That would explain why the working title of the movie was The Surrogate.
Hawkes (last in these pages in Contagion) has been quoted as saying he doesn't think it's interesting to see someone wallow in self-pity and his O'Brien is proactive in seeking out advice from therapists and a forward-thinking priest played by William H. Macy (profiled in The Lincoln Lawyer). Hunt's (won Oscar for As Good as It Gets (1997); my favorites include Twister (1996), Dr T and the Women (2000), Pay It Forward (2000), Cast Away (2000), What Women Want (2000) [big year for her!], A Good Woman (2004), and Then She Found Me (2007), which she also directed and co-wrote in her feature debut) Cheryl, the surrogate, starts off calm and businesslike (too businesslike at a time when I would have expected more sensitivity--now that I've read the article I see why the scene went that way) but is clearly nonplussed as events proceed.
Composer Marco Beltrami (Oscar-nominated for 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and The Hurt Locker; other work includes I, Robot (2004), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and a lot of horror movies) gives us a lovely score with lots of violin. You can sample it at the amazon page.
Director/writer Ben Lewin has but a few credits (at age 65), none familiar to me, and I'm surprised no writing credit is given to O'Brien, who died in 1999. But this is the actors' movie and you should definitely see it before the Oscars.
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