Ed. Note: The following is a movie review of Fox Searchlight Films Kinsey, a biopic of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a groundbreaking researcher in the field of sexuality.
Almost from the moment the project was announced, religious pro-censorship groups were up in arms over the fact that Hollywood was going to do a movie about America’s first prolific, rigorously scientific sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey. Both radio talk show host “Dr.” Laura Schlessinger and Meese Commission “researcher” Dr. Judith Reisman have mounted campaigns, first to have the project abandoned, and later, to convince moviegoers not to see it by charging that Kinsey’s personal sexuality included pedophilia (a charge this film skirts but does not deny) and that his research results were inaccurate, especially as regards homosexual behavior.
It is perhaps in response to such character assassination that the film’s releasing company has provided trailers to theaters and on its Website that are vague if not actually misleading about the film’s content. But hopefully, such skewed criticisms will simply inspire more viewers to attend this top-notch tale, which succeeds wildly on both cinematic and biographical levels.
The film is the story of Dr. Alfred Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson), who, in a series of flashbacks, is shown beginning his professional career as a biology professor at Indiana University, studying the gall wasp, a species which he notes seems to mutate with each generation. Kinsey becomes obsessed with cataloging all of the gall wasp variations he can find, and his classroom lectures center on the wasps as well.
Kinsey’s eccentric behavior attracts the interest of student Clara MacMillan (Laura Linney), and after she makes a play for him, the two are married – but when attempting to consummate their sexual relationship, the act proves too painful for “Mac,” and the couple seek the aid of a physician. Seems Mac’s hymen is too thick to be broken easily, and while the doctor offers to remedy the problem (presumably with his scalpel), both Kinseys begin to understand that the science of sexual behavior, its variety and even its anatomy is woefully inadequate. This is later driven home by the fact that several of Kinsey’s students begin coming to him for advice about their sexuality, and Kinsey’s own ignorance of some issues impels him to apply for a research grant to study human sexuality.
To this end, he recruits a number of interviewers, and as the film opens in the late 1940s, Kinsey is teaching his team – Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), Wardell Pomeroy (Chris O’Donnell) and Paul Gebhard (Timothy Hutton) – how to interview subjects as objectively as possible, and without betraying any emotional response they may have to the information they’re gleaning.
Cinematically, the film is enthralling, and the early segments beautifully edited, showing interviewer fading into interviewee and back again, building and building as hundreds of talking heads find themselves placed on a giant map of the U.S., with lines forming between them, apparently to show the interconnection of one’s self-described sexual behaviors with that of others.
But even as Kinsey studies others’ sexuality, he finds himself examining his own sexual assumptions and identity, and in a scene sure to start churchgoer tongues wagging, as he and Martin are bedding down in a hotel room for the night, after having interviewed several men about their sexual habits, they begin a discussion of homosexual attraction which winds up with the men kissing – before the screen fades to black, a sort of homage to the many similar (non)depictions of sex in popular films of the era.
While the main focus of the film is Kinsey himself, director Bill Condon has taken care to develop Mac’s character as well, depicting her as a woman well ahead of her time in sexual maturity, deeply in love with her husband but as intensely intelligent and curious as he is about the vastness of the sexual landscape. So while taken aback by Kinsey’s confession of his one-nighter with Martin, she manages to take it in stride – and eventually has a fling with him herself – at her husband’s suggestion.
But as Kinsey’s research team grows through marriage, their sexual interconnections grow as well – and of course, the era’s bluenoses take notice, hauling Kinsey before congressional committees and making trouble for him with his benefactors.
Along the way, viewers are treated to a host of minor but fascinating characters, including Kenneth Braun (William Sadler), who claims to have had sex with hundreds of men, women and children, and boasts (and “demonstrates,” albeit off-camera) that he can go from flaccid to ejaculation in 10 seconds. At another point, Kinsey and crew film the exploits of an older woman (Doris Smith) who claims to have near-constant orgasms.
Unquestionably, the story here will be intensely interesting to anyone in the adult entertainment field, and the screenplay will undoubtedly be considered for an Oscar nomination, but what’s equally attractive are the characters themselves, all well-drawn – especially Kinsey, Mac and Martin – and we’re likely to see Oscar nominations for Neeson, Linney and Sarsgaard as well.
It took a lot of courage to make this film, the concept of which Condon said he shopped around for nearly 10 years, and the result is a highly effective portrait of one of America’s sexual pioneers, warts and all, that adult retailers will likely want to stock along with their finest sexually explicit features – none of which would likely exist today had it not been for Kinsey’s groundbreaking work.
Kinsey opens in limited release on Nov. 12, and nationwide on Nov. 19
Kinsey
Fox Searchlight Films. D: Bill Condon. Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker, Julianne Nicholson, William Sadler, Veronica Cartwright, Others. 118 Min.
