Release Date: November 12, 2004
Starring: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O'Donnell, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow
Directed by: Bill Condon
Written by: Bill Condon
Distributed by: Fox Searchlight Pictures
MPAA Rating: R (pervasive sexual content, including some
graphic images and descriptions)
Kinsey, a somber, intellectual biopic written and directed by Bill Condon, flirts with greatness before finding itself undermined by convention -- not unlike its subject, the famous mid-century sex researcher and Indiana University professor, Alfred Kinsey, whose landmark study of human sexual behavior and the books he published on the subject won him widespread fame but a near-equal amount of animosity among America’s morally conservative establishment.
The best that can be said about Condon’s film, which stars a sad-eyed Liam Neeson as Kinsey, is that it does not assume, as many biopics do, that its hero is deserving of unqualified praise. Though the movie gives the viewer a pretty good idea of Kinsey’s infamous but revealing sex study -- an extensive interview covering almost every form of sexual behavior given to thousands of volunteer subjects nationwide in an attempt to determine the true norms of human sexual behavior -- and of the central characters’ candid attitudes toward sex, it does not deliver a verdict on Kinsey. Nor can it, really. For every viewer who recognizes the groundbreaking nature of his findings, there will probably be another who sees Kinsey and his associates as lewd, reprehensible, and even hedonistic.
I am part of the first group. As the movie shows, Kinsey, who did his research in the 1940’s, was alive in a time when misconceptions about sexual behavior were rampant: that masturbation would lead to blindness, that homosexuality was a precursor of insanity, or that couples only had sex after marriage and in the so-called missionary position, to name just a few. Moreover, there was no dialogue of any kind to change these widely held beliefs; America’s deeply-rooted Puritan morality (Kinsey’s father, played by John Lithgow, is a preacher who decries inventions such as electricity, the telephone, and even the zipper as conduits of lust) mandated that any and all talk about sex be kept explicitly private.
The other extreme, manifested by Kinsey, his wife Clara (Laura Linney), and his research assistants (played by Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, and Timothy Hutton), a state of affairs in which men and women engage in frank sexual discussions at backyard barbecues and around the dinner table, may be just as unsettling, however. The perfect balance between the two is a fine line, and one that the movie walks adroitly, even as many of its characters do not. While Kinsey’s study paved the way for more sexually informed generations, for instance, his clinical detachment occasionally led him into more questionable areas, such as when, in the search for more data, he interviews a man who claims to have had sex with thousands of people, among them hundreds of young boys and girls.
Like the subject he eventually became most famous for studying, Kinsey himself is an enigma, but one who is thankfully well played by Neeson (the film seems otherwise distracted by its content and slightly doubtful as to whether it merits feature-film length). In the movie, he comes off as a classic nerd of academia, an excitable man who wears three-piece suits with a trademark bowtie and styles his hair in the conservative crew cut of the 1940’s. That this aspect of his personality carries over into his sex research is sometimes amusing, and indeed it occasionally seems as if the movie is going simply for the nervous laughter that will inevitably result when a university professor starts talking about cunts and dicks.
But Kinsey’s scientific nature eventually underscores his true interest in sex: knowledge, not pornography. He is never once lewd or crass, and even the scene in which Kinsey and his research assistants watch a pornographic film they have made has a strange level of detachment. Nor does he pass judgment on others’ sexual behavior, insisting that he is only a taxonomist, interested solely in the collection and measurement of data to enlighten an otherwise uninformed world and demanding the same impartiality from his assistants. This was, of course, because much of what was then considered unusual was actually normal, and has since become accepted as such. (Except for, perhaps, homosexuality, a fact that seems slightly embarrassing considering that unlike everything else Kinsey uncovered, in many circles it is still regarded as deviant behavior. In one scene Kinsey tells a gay man that “Homosexuality is out of fashion right now, but that doesn’t mean it will always be that way.” If the movie’s depiction of society’s attitudes toward homosexuality in the 1940’s are accurate, then it is startling how little things have changed since then.)
But, as the movie tells it, these were things the public simply did not want to know at the time, and Kinsey eventually fell out of favor with his financiers when the public criticisms grew too strong. The movie seems to realize that Kinsey’s place in history was a thankless one, and as such, it has tempered its own ambitions. Kinsey is not an extraordinary biopic, only a straightforward accounting of a man’s life, neatly sorted out in by-the-book Hollywood fashion (the obvious and predictable parallels between his relationship with his father and his relationship with his son seem especially manufactured). Like most passable films of this genre, its greatest strength is its lead performance. It’s clear, however, that if not for the unusual nature of Kinsey’s work, Alfred Kinsey would not even be half as interesting as he is -- which leads me to wonder whether he really deserved the biopic treatment (and a half-hearted one at that) at all.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)