Kinsey

"We've got a couple of hours before dinner; time for a couple of sex surveys. Who wants to go first?"

This line from KINSEY is a great representation of the movie. It illustrates the film's offhanded sense of humor and shows that the otherwise taboo topic of sex is tossed about in a way that can be seen as being either casually shocking or mundanely trivial. And, logically enough, numerous scenes do happen at the dining table: sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, as played by Liam Neeson, chatters about sexual statistics over family backyard cookouts with his teenaged children, regales guests with graphic details of sexual minutiae at elegant affairs and ultimately ends up becoming a crashing bore at dinner parties as his compulsion to ramble on about all things sexual dominates his every conversation and waking thought.

What begins as a healthy interest and a professional curiosity becomes a tiresome obsession. In a way, Kinsey becomes a sex addict, but in a scholarly, detached sort of way. He's like a sports nut who's neither a player nor a spectator, but loves to collect the memorabilia and obsessively keep track of trivial statistics. He measures his sexual conquests less by the number of his bed partners than by how many people he seduces into answering his probing sex surveys. Research itself becomes a sexual fetish.

A disturbing, or at least revealing, aspect of the film is the implication that Kinsey seemed to blur the line separating the personal and professional in his pursuit of carnal knowledge. There is a scene where Kinsey and his assistant Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) go to a gay bar to round up people to interview and various men treat his request to answer questions as a joke, assuming that the survey is really a cheesy come on. And they might not be entirely wrong. Watching the film, one gets the feeling that Kinsey had a substantial sexual appetite, both physically and intellectually. The film suggests more than it reveals, but it hints that the lingering concerns over Kinsey's moral and ethical behavior might reflect more than just a germ of suspicion.

Though the film tries to memorialize Kinsey as a social pioneer, it doesn't shy away from (nor does it condemn) his dubious breaches of ethical standards, such as encouraging intramural sexual activities among his staff and their wives. At one point, Kinsey interviews a creepy subject played by William Sadler who has maintained a detailed record of all of the thousands of people he has had sex with (including children) and the implication is clear that he and Kinsey are two sides of the same coin -- both justifying their amoral pursuits in the name of intellectual enrichment.

Throughout the movie all things sexual are treated comically and seriously, trivially and ponderously, casually and obsessively. But only fleetingly is sex treated erotically. The film is graphic about sex, but in a textbook sort of way, not a pornographic way. Even the few sexual scenes involving Kinsey and his wife (Laura Linney) seem designed to illustrate an academic point, coming off as being more like classroom visual aids rather than moments of passion. The film delves into the good doctor's bisexuality, but gingerly treats it with equal reticence. Indeed, though a bit of full frontal nudity is supplied by Sarsgaard, he ends up putting his pajamas on before sharing an intimate kiss with Neeson. Perhaps the film's only moment of real sexual tension comes from two Boy Scouts discussing the sins of self gratification. (And they end up praying!)

The film is mostly all X-rated talk, with only a bit of PG-13 action. And the talk isn't even all that graphic, it just seems that way compared to the traditional -- skittish -- way films always approach the subject. If the film has any point it is that even though we have come a long way in dealing with sexuality, we still haven't gone all that far: political correctness having joined religious piety as a form of censorship. Kinsey worked to bring the most private of all human endeavors into public discourse, not realizing, or caring, that most people would still rather have it continue being -- literally -- private intercourse. As such, KINSEY still carries a certain shock value and the ability to milk much of its humor from its often embarrassingly blunt approach.

And humor may be the film's saving grace. Though, towards the end, the story takes on the usual air of self-importance that plagues most film biographies, writer-director Bill Condon refuses to let the film become too heavy-handed. Some of the humor is a bit obvious, such as picking John Lithgow to play Kinsey's pompous father, a fundamentalist preacher, in a performance that echoes the actor's similar role in FOOTLOOSE. But, for the most part the humor humanize the characters and doesn't present them as crusading icons or symbols of enlightenment. Like most film biographies, the honesty of KINSEY as history is debatable, as are the doctor's contribution to the health and welfare of the society. But as a film, KINSEY is like good sex, a briefly satisfying mix of passion and amusement.

Liam Neeson is a terrific actor, and Dr. Alfred Kinsey is his character. After seeing "Kinsey" I can't imagine anyone else better for the role. People usually say that, I know, but you couldn't possibly imagine anyone else playing the part, ever. I think Neeson has a strong chance at winning an Oscar this year; as does Laura Linney, playing Kinsey's wife, a terrifically kind, warm woman trying to keep up with Kinsey's life, which moves along pretty fast. Too fast for her at times. These two performances are awesome, two of the actors' best, the Academy, and every other awards show, would have to be insane not to mention them.

Unfortunately, I don't think the rest of the movie is really up to par with the performances. Not to say it's bad, just that it fails to really interest us when Neeson or Linney aren't on screen (which, fortunately, doesn't happen much). The movie is about Alfred Kinsey, who pioneered the research on human sexuality. Neeson shows him as a strong man, but one with as many flaws as the gall wasps he collected, all buried deep beneath his drive and focus.

Kinsey's studies proved some things, and let a lot of homosexuality and other deviances from the norm at the time out into the open. I'd just like to say that I agree with some of his studies, I like that he unlocked the way uptight supposed "morality" of the masses think that any sexual behavior other than the missionary position is both unhealthy and immoral. How they thought that I don't know, but I admire Kinsey for proving them wrong. Other things I do not agree with, like Kinsey's studies on the time it takes really young children to reach orgasm…and Kinsey's way of thinking that sex on its basic level should have no emotional attachment; I think I can say that these things are ethically wrong without feeling ignorant.

But I won't be biased against the quality of the film because of this. I will speak of the technique of how it was made: the writing, the directing, etc. I liked how the movie began: with a black and white practice interview between Kinsey, his wife Clara, and their students. It is inter-cut with scenes from Kinsey's youth: Kinsey facing temptation with masturbation, and having trouble with his insanely strict father (John Lithgow).

Lithgow's first scene, where he speaks of the temptation and evil caused by zippers, electricity and ice cream parlors is the film's first problem. It doesn't show both sides of Kinsey's argument, it merely dismisses Lithgow – and those like him – as a laughing stock, instead of considering any validity in points that they're making.

This problem is carried throughout the movie, and Lithgow is seen as such a monster that we feel no sympathy for his character in a later scene showing his inner weakness and tragic past, the scene feels thrown in and very foreign to the rest of the movie.

I think the opening scenes, with Kinsey and Clara first falling for each other, and his proposal and collection of gall wasps, are the movie's best, I believe. Once Kinsey starts his research on sex I think the movie becomes a bit conventional. We get the usual scenes such as Kinsey alienated from his family, Kinsey receiving trouble from his financial backers, Clara feeling alienated from Kinsey, and so on. Of course, most of the time we watch eagerly, because Neeson and Linney are awesome, but we still have that itching feeling that the film isn't as special as Ebert says.

What I mean is, after decades of biopics, especially this year; a biopic has to be more than conventional. Unless the lead character is amazing and extremely watchable, like in "Ray", the film needs to show us something new. I mean, when you see a biopic, you pretty much know the lead is going be alienated from his family, obsessed with his work and full of inner demons. So give us something else, please.

Problems also arise with the introduction of Kinsey's staff, including bisexual Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), Wardell Pomeroy (Chris O'Donnell) and Paul Gebhart (Timothy Hutton). The problem is, we hardly know any of these characters, so we are bored when they get into arguments because we don't feel that we know anything about them. When we find out that Martin is bisexual it comes as a surprise, but we react with a shrug. Sarsgaard's performance is surprisingly flat; that he's getting any buzz for awards surprises me.

I'm giving the movie a seven simply because of the professionalism Neeson and Linney display on screen. They are the acting pros; they wash the floor with the rest of the cast. The Academy voters will all be struck by lightning if either isn't mentioned. So see it for them, and about the rest, well, shrug.

7/10

Just as the focus of "Kinsey" thought he was being objective about a topic that had only been treated subjectively, the film is not an objective bio-pic.

For the first half of the movie, the exquisite production design, costumes and make-up effectively recreate middle America before World War II, as Kinsey's rigid upbringing and equally rigid scientific life as a zoologist are established.

Laura Linney as first his student then his wife adds an earthy and warm element and her excellent acting adds womanliness beyond the script to the movie that is missing otherwise. Their gradual move into teaching and studying sexuality is shown convincingly in contrast to the prigs around them, with, ironically surely, Tim Curry playing his puritanical academic rival.

Accurate details include showing and reading from a popular marriage manual, Theodoor H. van de Velde's "Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique;" when I ran a used book sale at my local synagogue we would get many unread copies donated from now elderly couples who had received it as part of pre-marital rabbinical counseling and it was hilarious how sexist and inaccurate it was.

But writer/director Bill Condon takes considerable interpretive leaps as he moves on to "the inner circle," as T. Coraghessan Boyle terms it in his fictionalized interpretation, when Kinsey hires, trains, works and lives closely with male assistants for his first research project on men.

Peter Sarsgaard is the stand out in the trio, as outstanding as his role in "Shattered Glass" and as all holds barred as in "The Center of the World." But his characterization leans toward a cavalier attitude towards women that is emblematic of this film until literally the last minute. I don't see why his character would be jealous to the point of fisticuffs of the attentions Timothy Hutton's flirtatious assistant would be paying to his wife when he seemed to condescend to marriage only for appearance's sake anyway.

The film dwells on gay men and skips through the research done to produce the second tome on women, pointing out mostly Kinsey's corrective biological information, therefore gliding over how it was the revelations about women that shocked the nation and led to difficult political and other consequences, though Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman had promulgated similar information about women decades earlier (and had been hounded out of the country for their efforts). The Kinsey Institute's FAQ on their Web site point out the active partnership of female research assistants for this work, who simply don't exist in the film. (And the Congressional investigations of foundations in the 1950's didn't just focus on the Rockefeller Foundation's funding of Kinsey, but they haven't yet posted their correctives on their Web site.)

Similarly, as Kinsey is shown taking the leap from taxonomy to adviser as an avatar of the coming sexual revolution, the psychological component of relationships, let alone sex, only comes up once such that Liam Neeson's characterization ultimately seems naive. But Condon is more interested in the political component, as he clearly sees a similar tide of conservative criticism rising across the land again.

One also gets the feeling that someone either read the script or saw a working print of the film and had to gently point out to Condon that women simply get short shrift, so suddenly an extremely poignant coda is added, with Lynn Redgrave as a very moving interviewee on how Kinsey's work affected her life directly.

The aging make-up and cinematography are beautiful in indicating the passage of time, matching seasonal passings and making early discussions seem to have been documented in black and white.

The casting of the many research subjects is wonderfully varied and the New York metropolitan area locations, recognizable only to the cognoscenti, stand in very well for varied cities, academic and sylvan locales.

The closing credits are surrounded by fun period songs and zoological interactions.

Here's a major problem in drama. You want to deal with big issues, great disembodied, cosmic sweeps of things. Things that people love or make them suffer. This is why people come.

But the tools we have to display these things are humans, usually. So the dramatist has to invent or find situations that have humans, human behavior and these grandsweeps entangled in some way. And it has to be a particular way so that the engagement with the humans on the screen leads us somehow to those sweeps.

Sometimes the connection is daft as we equate certain people as surrogates for trends. I had a school teacher that (twice!) showed us "Johnny Tremain" as our main lesson on the Revolutionary War.

Okay. One of the big things that entices and scars us is sex, and particularly its incomprehensible but overwhelming nature. So what makes more sense to us, who wish to understand it, than a story about a man who dedicated his life to understanding it?

Well, there are two problems, long before you get to the skill of the thing. The first is that if the character is to bring us to the topic, he has to be fully entangled. The two have to merge in a way that when we see and understand him, we find ourselves incidentally in the clouds of the thing he represents. It doesn't happen.

And part of the reason is the nature of the man himself. Ordinary audiences think of science as a single notion. But it is not. There is the business of noting what is there, but that is the secretarial work of science. Mere accounting. Then there is the business of spinning abstractions, models, theories then insight and understanding. Kinsey was the first and blindly so, in fact he would appear to a full scientist just as Tim Curry's character is to him here.

Counting is not comprehension. So in real life, this is more of a "Tucker" story than a John Nash one. And it is mighty hard to weave that entanglement if it was never there, and the nature of the thing takes you in the wrong direction.

What underscores this is that the opposing forces here — religious moralists, pontificating politicians — are stronger and more numerous today when it comes to matters sexual than more than 50 years ago. There's been negative progress, both because Kinsey was off, but also because people like those behind this film actually thought that was the good fight.

Linney gets it. She's a pleasure in any project. She gets it because she conveys to us the simple tolerance of her man and all that surrounds him, including the film crew and we the audience. She shows us all that she knows we're fooling ourselves about this, and that wisdom and insight is deadly elusive.

Its going to take more than the Ron Howard school of film-making to make us fly into sexual insights. it is a clever idea to frame the thing as an interview with him, to introduce him as an interviewer. Just not enough.

There's a very fine bit of acting in this. Almost at the end, in less than three minutes, Lynn Redgrave is an interviewee who tells Kinsey he saved her life. Watch it and believe. Here is an example of how that entanglement can work.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

My thoughts of "Kinsey" are completely summed up in the summary.

It is shallow in that it is almost completely devoid of any analysis, subtlety, or development of its characters; meaningless in that it presents nothing that isn't already known or couldn't be surmised from a documentary; and destined to be the most overrated film of the year in that most critics praise the film, almost blindly, ignoring the stilted dialogue, the almost nauseating depiction of human behavior - devoid of analytical follow-ups, and the very, VERY standard performances. The film includes a below average turn by Liam Neeson, who, despite perhaps giving a good impression of Kinsey, never manages to conceal his accent, and CANNOT handle any drama that needed to be conveyed. His dramatic scenes reminded me of those of Cary Elwes' in "Saw", and if you seen those scenes, you know what I mean.

"Kinsey" was utterly pointless as a movie. It featured a lot of depicted fact, a lot of graphic sex talk, and lot of graphic images that curiously managed to "sneak" past the MPAA's pocketbooks, I mean, ratings system. It never once attempted to show why "Kinsey" was fascinated by sex, why his constituents were so easily enveloped into his sexually lax world, or why Linney stayed with him. They never developed these characters at all. Their gross actions were never discussed or examined by the director.

There is a scene in "Kinsey" that sums up my opinion of the film. In it, a man being interviewed by Kinsey claims he has slept with basically everything. I mean EVERYTHING. Think of something, hes slept with it. He goes into graphic detail about his sex life and demonstrates his ability to obtain an erection and a subsequent self-administered orgasm in 10 seconds, all the while Kinsey just watches sternly, and his partner squirms, and eventually leaves in disgust. Later, the same partner is seen having sex with a much older woman for the purpose of the study, smiling raunchily while watching the grainy video of the deed. Why? Who knows? Is it in is character to be both disgusted by the actions of one man, and obviously enthralled by his own actions? No it isn't. And it seems that the director does not care to elaborate.

For sure, Condon manages to shock with his film. But by the end, the sex has become so repulsively clinical, that its shock value is lost, and the film really takes on no meaning, becoming just plain boring.

It tries to slap on a metaphor about men and trees at the end, but its just too quick and dirty to make up for the film's lack of analysis about its subject, or about America.

Why do critics and film patrons hail the film? It shows what most films aren't allowed to show. Any film that non-chalantly features graphic female and male nudity, frequently, and can still be featured with an R rating at any movie theatre most be an edgy great movie, right? Wrong. (And may I just note that an increasing amount of male nudity has found its way into major theaters through indie, artsy films like "Kinsey" and "Sideways". Its interesting to note that two of the most well-reviewed films of the year both break R-rated bounds frequently within their running times).

With such a high pedigree in its creative team, it seems almost impossible for the film to be anything other than superb. But for this moviegoer, it, no pun intended, sucked the big one.