Kinsey
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Movie Reviews of Kinsey
Movie Review: Everything you wanted to know....AND you were afraid to ask.
Summary: 5 Stars
Wow. Whoa. Wow.
Having just seen a preview of the movie, I may still be too engrossed in "processing" it to be fair to it on any level other than as an indie film based on a true story. There's far more to this film than that, but how much of it is understanding the impact that Alfred Kinsey, "Prok" (short for "Professor K"), had on our society, and how much is the profundity of Liam Neeson's brilliant protrayal of the man, I am still sorting out.
I felt an instant kinship with Kinsey the character at the beginning of the film. His fascination with the gall wasp because of each individual wasp's uniqueness is the same chord that drove me to major in biology in college. The fundamental truth of biology, as Professor Kinsey joyfully points out to his class, is that in the commonality of the species, the miracle of individual variation reigns. Yet that awe inspired by individual variation was the same drive that led him to try to describe the average, the median, and the mean of "normal" human sexual behavior.
It also empowered him to conduct individual interviews with respect for the individual in a way that had never been contemplated before. I just read a very unintentionally funny "conservative" editorial criticizing the film for exalting a man whose scientific methods were so flawed. Criticize the man or the film on whatever moral grounds you choose, the fact is that Kinsey was a pioneer not only in gathering data about human sexual behavior, he was also a pioneer in developing the methodology of gathering data by individual survey. Of course his methods were flawed! His surveying technique was all about "on the job" training, and he had to learn from his own mistakes. And many, many others, in other fields of endeavor, have learned both from his mistakes and from his successes.
Showing the novelty of his ideas in an era of sexual repression; mentioning Edgar Hoover and the FBI both wanting to use Kinsey and to vilify him; and learning that it was the Rockefeller Foundation which initially funded his work, while his university was at first timid about sponsoring him; hearing his father's outrageously repressive sermons juxtaposed with Alfred Kinsey's insistence on plain if shocking words, not euphemisms, for sex, define his place in our culture by highly contrastive ideas and experiences. It is clear that society wanted to know about sex; it is also clear that they didn't know how much more they wanted to know.
Liam Neeson is so good that even a great fan of his, which I am, can forget they are watching Neeson the actor, and watch him give Kinsey, this odd, eerily "objective" scientific observer, a characterization which makes him completely, humanly real, and strangely charming. Kinsey's imperviousness to others' reactions to him is the strength that enabled him to pioneer studying a field that previously had not even been discussed in polite society. The odd mix of courage and blindness to the outrage he left in his wake, the tactless curiosity and the respect for the individual that allowed his subjects to talk to him with fewer inhibitions than they had ever had, and the genuine love and caring he felt for his wife coupled with the self-righteousness he felt about his studies when his investigations into his own and others' feelings hurt her, were some of the paradoxes that describe a man who thoroughly changed our culture. Whatever his studies showed, his legacy is that we can now talk about sex, and how profoundly that influenced the sexual revolution must be the study of historians, sociologists, and psychiatrists (not to mention politicians) everywhere.
Neeson should almost certainly be on the Oscar "best actor" nominee list. Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Kinsey's assistant Clyde Martin, will, I hope, finally receive an overdue nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Laura Linney as Kinsey's wife Clara McMillen is very, very good, but though there is "Oscar buzz" about her performance, and she is wonderful, I think her performance is slightly less awe-inspiring than Neeson's and Sarsgaard's. I enjoyed the ironic deliciousness of Tim Curry playing the professor who decried the salaciousness of Kinsey's work, and have come to depend on Oliver Platt to be good in good movies. Lynne Redgrave as the final interviewee was dessert, a little lagniappe on top of every other fine detail.
The music was half-and-half; half very good, half "off" and distracting. The first minutes of the film which were not involved with the interview of Kinsey by his assistants were so disconnected that I had the sense the entire movie would be jumpy, which it was not: it was fascinating. I don't know that we needed quite so many young Kinseys to illustrate his growing up, but that is a very small flaw in a very good movie. Not only did I enjoy the movie, I learned from it. Grade: A -- .
Movie Review: Morality, McCarthy, and science - oh MY!
Summary: 5 Stars
KINSEY is so well acted that it seems nearly the most perfectly scripted documentary in the history of film. The acting performances were stunning. Liam Neeson was strong, confident, and zealous, and Laura Linney was entirely believable as a spouse that married a collector of bugs and became the spouse of a man who collected `scientific data' on people's sex lives. Although that does not do Kinsey's work justice. In my opinion, his work was some of the most important scientific/sociological work performed in the 20th century.
What struck me through nearly every moment of the film was how strikingly similar the climate of his day is to today's social climate. Second to that, I was amazed that society was progressive enough to allow Kinsey to conduct his work, although in the end his funding from the Rockefeller Foundation was cut - yet another "Hey, Thanks!" to good ol' McCarthy (the nut job).
Today we're seeing heightened conservatism with regard to sexuality. Some of that has to do with disease - specifically, AIDS. Some of that is also related to recent attempts by many gay groups to make gay marriage legal. (This is something, by the way, that one day society will look back on and say, "duh!", just like interracial marriages, and giving African Americans and women the right to vote. How so many people don't understand that boggles the mind. [That should get me some negative votes!]) So the release of this film, at this particular time, illustrated how most events are cyclical. I drew hope from the film, because looking back on history I know that the McCarthy nonsense went away, and today is spoken of mostly in embarrassed tones. I believe that in the next decade, we will see a similar shift in "morality".
I read the Kinsey Report in high school, and remember thinking - by gosh, I'm normal! I'm not going to go blind after all, or grow hair on my palms! I found out that on a "normal" scale, if there was such a thing, I was far closer to normal than I had ever believed. Like the last scene in the film, a touching two minute "interview" with a character played by Lynn Redgrave, it changed my life.
This movie was full of surprises. I don't know if the depictions of Kinsey being as strict and preachy and zealous as he was in the film are correct, but if they are, then Neeson really hit the mark. He does such a good job when playing real people: Schindler's List, Michael Collins, Kinsey. He is able to immerse himself into the reality of the situation, and what we see on the screen isn't acting - we see the person he is representing. That takes talent, and he has it in spades.
Like the social climate I mentioned above, the movie itself is cyclical, coming full circle. It begins by showing Kinsey's love, even as a young boy, of observing and noting nature, and ends on the same note. He is still working on his "sex studies", of course, but we see him appreciating the thing that interested him in science in the beginning, and we're simply reminded of it at the end.
Of all the wonderful performances, there was one other standout. John Lithgow - always wonderful - played Kinsey's father: a preacher, a domineering husband and father, and an all around jerk. (There's a better word, but I doubt Amazon would publish this review if I used it.) If he doesn't get an Oscar nod, it's only because he wasn't on the screen long enough. But whenever he was, he stole every scene.
But he was so basely mean that at his own wife's funeral, when offered condolences, he remarked, "Well it won't be as if I'm alone. My overweight daughter has no marriage prospects, and my other son has moved back home because he [failed at something]. Prock [Albert Kinsey's nickname] is working on some ridiculous study..." Basically, he humiliated his children at their mother's wake.
In a typical Kinsey moment, he placed his hands on his hips and directed the full intensity of his character at his father (which is, trust, me, significant). "Do you want to know what I'm working on? It's a sex study, and I'd like you to participate in it."
Oddly enough, the father agreed, and when the topic of manual stimulation came up the answer was one of the most shocking things that's even passed through these ears. You'll have to hear it yourself to believe it.
This is one of the best movies I've seen depicting a true story that I've ever seen.
Movie Review: "Morals masquerading as information"
Summary: 5 Stars
Kinsey is one of those rare films that manage to be entertaining, enlightening, provocative, and funny all at the same time. As a biopic of the twentieth century's most famous sex researcher, the film is unsurpassed, but the movie also works as a type of historical period piece. The era of he 1950's, while seemingly puritanical on the surface, was in fact, rife with people doing it in all sorts of ways.
Alfred Kinsey's findings were seminal in discounting the sexual norm. Society's efforts to impose an arbitrary sexual standard amounts to cruel and unusual punishment on an individual's sexual nature, especially when it's different from everyone else's. Kudos goes to Alfred Kinsey (a wonderful Liam Neeson) who actively bought this to the surface, and showed us that sex was so much more than just the socially sanctioned "husband, and wife equals babies."
Blessed with memorable performances and a candid, sophisticated screenplay, the movie doesn't shy away from honest and blatant sexual topics; in fact, the frank and sincere tone probably works in its favour. The sex talk is never exploitive or gratuitous, and is always presented in a format that pays homage to Kinsey's own penchant towards analytical scientific analysis. The film begins with Kinsey's famous interview technique on the man himself, and traces Kinsey's troubled childhood, and his strained relationship with his puritanical father (John Lithgow), an engineering teacher and occasional Sunday school preacher.
Seeking solace from his repressive home life, Kinsey spends his days in the forest observing the natural world around him. He eventually becomes a Harvard-educated zoologist specializing in the study of gall wasps. After being hired to teach biology at Indiana University, Kinsey meets and marries the progressive female student, Clara McMillen (another fine performance by Laura Linney). In the course of his teaching Kinsey discovers an astonishing dearth of scientific data on sexual behaviour, and this, combined with the fact that the couple have had problems sexually consummating their marriage, leads Kinsey to become interested in the study of sexual dysfunction and behaviour.
Kinsey recruits a team of researchers, including Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), Wardell Pomeroy (Chris O'Donnell), and Paul Gebhard (Timothy Hutton), to travel the across the United States, and through a process of confidential face-to-face interviews, amass a huge body of information on people's sex lives. (There's one hilarious scene where they try to interview homosexual men in a local Chicago gay bar). Kinsey publishes these findings in 1948 and calls it Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The press compares the impact to that of the atom bomb, and Kinsey's follow-up study on women is seen as an attack on basic American values. He loses his funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and in order to continue his research, he is forced to beg for money from other wealthy benefactors.
Neeson plays Kinsey with a damaged passion. He comes across as a troubled genius, a flawed scientist whose resolute commitment to the subject matter prompted him, and those around him to experiment sexually, to the detriment of their own personal relationships; it's interesting that he never discusses the effects of love on sex because he admits that he "can't scientifically measure love."
Kinsey is haunted by his puritanical past, but he realizes that the future of healthy relationships and marriages lies in uninhibited discussion, non-judgmental values, and sexual openness. Neeson and Linney are absolutely marvelous, and the entire supporting cast credible and terrific. Peter Sarsgaard is especially good - and the scene where he's totally nude really adds to the sincerity of his sexually ambivalent character. Kinsey is without a doubt, one of the year's best films. There will be lots of nominations come Oscar time. Mike Leonard November 04.
Movie Review: A Brilliant Examination of Man's Obsession and Contribution
Summary: 5 Stars
KINSEY is a triumph, not only for writer and director Bill Condon, but also for a first class portrayal of one of the more significant minds of the 20th Century - Alfred Kinsey, brought vigorously to life by Liam Neeson in one of the finest performances of the year. It is difficult to believe that Kinsey's opening of the Pandora's Box of human sexuality occurred only fifty years ago. And while Kinsey's name is one known to everyone, Kinsey's struggles as a person have not been explored until recently: credit TC Boyle's fine novel THE INNER CIRCLE for some of the attendant interest in this film.
The fact that the techniques of data gathering were quintessentially important to Kinsey's scientific investigation is acknowledged from the start of his film: Kinsey is being interviewed about his sex life by one of his well trained associates. Kinsey's early formative years are shown to be those of a child fascinated by observing nature while struggling with a controlling father (John Lithgow). A man of vision from the beginning, Kinsey follows his desire to be a biologist and joins the faculty of Indiana University where he concentrates on the behavior and classification of Gall Wasps. One of his students Clyde (Peter Sargaard) becomes his private pupil, Kinsey meets and marries Mac (Laura Linney), and partially because of his failure at consummating his marriage while being consumed at the scientific variations in his Gall Wasps he begins to explore the variations in human sexuality, opening the door to his monumental studies.
Once conquering his sexual problem with Mac, he proceeds to sire four children, take on a staff (Sarsgaard, Chris O'Donnell, and Timothy Hutton), spreading his sexual interviews from the campus student body to various cities throughout the USA. Along the way he explores the homosexual aspect of his own sexuality, encourages his sexual consort Clyde to expand his horizons by having sex with Mac, and in general creates a loose atmosphere that begins to concern his College administrators (Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker, Tim Curry).
Eventually finding funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kinsey Report is completed and published to overwhelming success. It is the second volume exploring FEMALE sexuality that is difficult for the college and the public alike to tolerate and Kinsey slowly falls out of favor, but not without continuing some of his finest most controversial work.
Each of the cast members is superb with special kudos being given to Liam Neesom and Laura Linney, but also with very special mention to the relatively small roles by John Lithgow and a cameo by Lynn Redgrave that is one of the most sensitive few minutes on film. See the film for discovering the extensive implications of Kinsey's work, for the fineness of the script and the actual movie, and for an appreciation of how far we have come in the past fifty years! Highly Recommended. Grady Harp January 2005
Movie Review: Puritan Buster
Summary: 5 Stars
`Kinsey', a film that tells the story of sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, will like most films of controversial characters from recent history, affect its viewers largely according to how they come down on the controversy. In this case, the controversy is between those who identify most closely with the late sexual revolution and those in the camp of the ongoing counter sexual revolution. As this film has a highly sympathetic take on Kinsey's story, those counter revolutionaries are best advised to avoid it, unless they wish to use it to work themselves into righteous outrages. Those like me, whose sympathies lie with the spirit of the sexual revolution will find not outrage, but a fine film.
The film deftly weaves together Kinsey's personal and professional lives, showing one as the natural extension of the other. Much of his motivation is explained through two important family relationships - his rejection of his father, portrayed here by John Lithgow as an insufferably puritanical prig, and his extraordinary, unorthodox marriage partnership with a remarkable, free thinking woman, a role played superbly by Laura Linney (who deserved to win the best actress Oscar for which she was nominated). Liam Neeson played Kinsey as obsessively focused and driven, often domineering, and nearly evangelical in his quest to liberate sexuality from the darkness of Puritanism and prudishness into the light of pure science. It is through his relationships with his family that he emerges as such a sympathetic character. Even his research assistants are shown as becoming a sort of extended family to him, continuing that theme.
The film does not present Kinsey as a faultless hero. He is portrayed as sometimes so obsessed with his quest as to become myopic; unable to foresee how his research would release certain raging wild fires into a society long accustomed to the restrains of Puritan social mores. It even touches on the possibility of irregularities within his research, but here it is shown as a small problem easily overcome rather than the overwhelming fault that would discredit the entirety of the man and his research as his detractors like to imagine. But these faults humanize rather than destroy the legend of a man who dedicated his life to bringing rationality to human sexuality.
Scattered throughout the film are several devices used to tell the story, including flashbacks and black and white footage of practice interviews Kinsey conducted with his researchers, but despite this, the film still flows along nicely. In addition to the outstanding leads of Neeson and Linney, the supporting roles are strong, including a notable performance from Peter Sarsgaard as Kinsey's principle research assistant. It is a good tale, and a fine film, and has my recommendation.
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