Pandora was that Greek mythological dame who opened up the forbidden box. Alfred C. Kinsey was a repressed academic who studied gall wasps, taught at Indiana University, and wore bow ties.
They had something in common, though, having both unleashed something that couldn’t be put back in the box. In Kinsey’s case, it was the subject of sex, in his landmark books “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” published in 1948 and 1953, respectively.
“Kinsey” is a new film that looks at the life of this unlikely iconoclast. Although he was rather starchy in many ways (studying the gall wasp for 20 years will do that), Kinsey was revealed in a few recent biographies to be a rather more colorful figure than was known at the time.
Writer-director Bill Condon, who won an Oscar for scripting “Gods and Monsters,” uses all the available information to sketch a portrait of Kinsey, from the admirable to the unsavory. With the help of a terrific performance by Liam Neeson, it becomes an enlightening story – flawed but engaging.
Kinsey was born in 1894. His father, an engineer and Sunday school teacher, was a model of Victorian rectitude, and Kinsey grew up to be a straight-laced biologist. He married Clara McMillen and settled into academia.
The film introduces Kinsey’s early life in quick but telling strokes. His frank, scientist’s approach to teaching a marriage class at Indiana is seen as the spark that drove him into sex research; when students come to ask him questions about sex, he realizes there are no answers, because no one has ever studied the subject in a cold, factual way.
Thus Kinsey develops a lengthy questionnaire, which he applied to thousands of people across the country. After publication, fame follows (his name was as familiar as any movie star’s), and so does a period of experimentation done in the name of research: Kinsey’s own experiences with bisexuality, the filming of subjects in sex, and the use of his assistants in what could only be called scientific orgies.
Condon keeps a balanced eye on all this, which means Kinsey emerges as a sympathetic but not simple-mindedly heroic figure. There’s a strain of humor beneath the portrayal of this starchy man, who not only brings up subjects that make everybody uncomfortable but doesn’t use euphemisms to describe sex. Neeson catches this quality in one of his best performances.
Laura Linney plays Kinsey’s wife, who was surely an interesting person. Kinsey’s trio of sex researchers are played by Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton and Chris O’Donnell (there must be a whole separate movie in their lives), with John Lithgow as Kinsey’s authoritarian father.
Kinsey himself later admitted that some of his data was flawed, but the fundamental revelations in his books hit postwar America like a ton of forbidden fruit. To some extent he approached human sexuality the way he approached gall wasps, and his lack of moralizing about sex was seen by some as a moral statement (or immoral statement) in and of itself.
He’s been dead for almost 50 years, but Kinsey is still paying the price for bringing sex out of the shadows. An organized effort to denounce the movie has been launched, with Kinsey compared to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele by one wild-eyed commentator. (The press releases debunking Galileo are probably on their way.) Which goes to show how little we’ve figured out about sex.
Liam Neeson stars as biologist Alfred Kinsey in “Kinsey.”
“Kinsey”HHH
Enlightening: A look at the life of Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher whose bombshell books shook up America. Both admirable and unsavory aspects of Kinsey’s life are included, although the film is basically sympathetic to him (and Liam Neeson’s terrific performance catches the humor of a starchy scientist bluntly describing the wildest sex acts). With Laura Linney.
Rated: R rating is for nudity, language, subject matter.
Now showing: Egyptian.
“Kinsey”HHH
Enlightening: A look at the life of Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher whose bombshell books shook up America. Both admirable and unsavory aspects of Kinsey’s life are included, although the film is basically sympathetic to him (and Liam Neeson’s terrific performance catches the humor of a starchy scientist bluntly describing the wildest sex acts). With Laura Linney.
Rated: R rating is for nudity, language, subject matter.
Now showing: Egyptian.
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