Kinsey
Directed by: Bill Condon
Written by: Bill Condon
Starring: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, John Lithgow, Timothy Hutton, Oliver Platt, Chris O'Donnell
Country: U.S.A.
Rating: Four Glorious Orgasms (and maybe a wet dream).
Even Educated Gall Wasps Do It.
Alfred Kinsey Jr., for the uninitiated, did more to get people to talk about sex than, say, Bill Clinton. Kinsey's motivation was purely scientific, at least at first, and to give him his due in its finality. An obsessive man, when he got hold of an idea it wasn't in his nature to let it go. This, of course, was the source of his greatness and his fallibility.
His first scientific obsession was with insects and most notably, the gall wasp. He purportedly collected more than half a million in his lifetime. Through close study he discovered that no gall wasp was identically the same. It's probably apocryphal this led him to the conclusion homo sapiens sex lives were as varied as the stars, but he threw himself into this examination and analysis with the same fervour. The world hasn't been the same since. Depending who you talk to, that's either a very good or bad thing.
The question for the movie going public (and critics), is there a movie here? You betcha.
Bio-pics are one of the more difficult genres of film to make. You're either boring people to death with things we already know or have some inkling about, or telling huge lies to engage the viewer. Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) has done neither. He's managed to get to the essence of a fascinating historical character and to nail down the broader societal issues in an intelligent way.
The strength of the story is that Condon holds a tight rein. He never strays far from Kinsey, his family and the colleagues he draws around him in his life work. Because, you see, they were equally affected on a deeply, personal level by the forces Kinsey lets out of the bottle by getting people to talk about the most private of things—their sex lives. This started with Kinsey himself. He came from a socially and sexually repressed childhood—his father was a totalitarian preacher who thought the invention of zippers, and the easy access they provided to weak-fleshed fingers, were the work of the devil. Kinsey and his highly-educated wife were both virgins on their wedding night, which proved to be a painful disaster. Liberal and inquisitive, this then was their starting point.
Kinsey's major tool was a questionnaire (to be delivered by a researcher) detailing a respondent's sexual history. After he had trained the first researcher how to get people to open up, Kinsey was the first subject. Condon cleverly uses this interview as an ongoing narrative that provides a spine to the story.
The resulting research led to a ground-breaking book in 1948: "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male". But it led to much more. All the frank talk around the dinner table and the close proximity to each other resulted in Kinsey, his wife Mac, and the researchers and their wives to start ‘experimenting' with their own sexual behaviour. Just for scientific purposes mind you. The idea was that sex and love were two rigidly identifiable phenomena mutually exclusive of one another. The adulteries and orgies that followed led to marital breakups and bitter recriminations.
The acting is superb. Liam Neeson, as the driven and obstinate Kinsey, is confused by his fall from grace. Poignantly, he's unaware of the same obsessive gene that he abhors in his father. Laura Linney as Mac quietly holds the screen as the fiercely independent but loyal partner. She's the embodiment of the debate over sex and love and grows within that struggle. It's clear to her that love is scientifically immeasurable. Peter Sarsgaard, the assistant who beds both the Kinseys, conveys a shiftiness that belies final feelings of sympathy. John Lithgow, as Kinsey Sr., puts meat on the bones of the character he played in Footloose as the fundamentalist preacher. He's redeemed somewhat in a great scene where the source of his vile bitterness is revealed. Oliver Platt is notable as the liberal and savvy President of Indiana University who props up Kinsey's work. Tim Curry is delicious as a prudish instructor. And you can look for a nice (but important) cameo by Lynn Redgrave at the end.
I suggest this is an important film, because despite Kinsey's ability to get us talking about our sexuality, in some ways not much has changed. There are those who would wish to turn back the clock. Conservative American religious groups planned demonstrations when the film was released last Friday
Robert Knight, spokesman for Concerned Women for America—get your mind around that one—likens the positive portrayal of Kinsey as sacrilegious. He says ‘[his] proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist." Kinsey is also collared with inspiring the sexual revolution (probably true) and the homosexual activist movement, the campaign to mainstream pornography and the striking down of abortion laws.
It's as if Alfred Kinsey Sr. has risen from the grave. Stop fondling that zipper.
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