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Kinsey
Given this film's Oscar hopes (which are well-justified), I expect it will have its own thread soon enough. But it's a Fox Searchlight film currently playing in five theaters, and I think it belongs here.
There's already controversy over the accuracy of the film's portrayal of sex research pioneer Alfred Kinsey, and that's not surprising. Kinsey was probably more responsible than anyone (including Hugh Hefner) for the so-called sexual revoluation of late 20th century America. One's attitude toward Kinsey is very much a product of how one feels about that trend. What should not be controversial is the qualiy of writer-director Bill Condon's film, which is superbly crafted and brilliantly performed.
Condon doesn't make the mistake of trying to avoid bio-pic cliches -- on the contrary, he embraces them and makes them work to his advantage. His subject was a man who interviewed thousands of people about their sexual histories; so Condon opens the film with Kinsey being interviewed by several of his assistants as a training exercise. It's an efficient narrative device that, coupled with flashbacks, very quickly gives us a portrait of Kinsey as he was just beginning the landmark studies of sexual behavior that, for better or worse, are his legacy.
Liam Neeson's portrayal of Kinsey is extraordinary. It may suffer during awards season, because Neeson doesn't hesitate to make the audience uncomfortable. There's something unsettling in the single-minded devotion of this fundamentally shy individual to digging out the most intimate secrets in people's lives -- his own and everyone else's. In his own way, Kinsey was as rigorous, uncompromising and ultimately insensitive as the puritanical father (played by John Lithgow) against whom he rebelled. There is a key scene in the latter part of the film where Kinsey and an assistant interview a voracious sexual explorer played by William Sadler, who, like Kinsey, is obsessed with documenting his explorations. When it emerges that those explorations included pedophilia, Kinsey's assistant, despite all the training in objectivity and detachment, leaves the room in disgust. But Kinsey remains and listens. The scene is the film's way of showing that scientific detachment has its perils.
Of equal caliber is Laura Linney's potrayal of Clara Kinsey, who is, if anything, an even more complicated character than her husband. In scene after scene, Neeson and Linney draw you into the inner world of what had to be one of the more unusual marriages of its time. The scene where Kinsey confesses a homosexual encounter with one of his assistants (another exceptional portrayal by Peter Sarsgaard) is equal parts moving and disturbing. The later scene where Clara herself has an open fling with the same assistant is both disturbing and very funny. It takes an extraordinary cast and a very sure directorial hand to get away with this material and not lose the audience.
Kinsey's landmark 1948 publication Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made him a household name, and the film deftly covers that development (complete with Cole Porter lyrics!) and the inevitable backlash that followed. Given the national debate about "values" in which we are now engaged, the film actually seems more timely than perhaps it did when the project was first conceived. There is no doubt where the film's sympathies lie -- Kinsey's chief nemesis on the faculty at Indiana University is played by Tim Curry as a repressive buffoon (which is pretty funny if you remember him as Frank 'N' Furter) -- and the film could easily become a contemporary lightning rod. But even if one disapproves of Kinsey, the bell that he rang can't be unrung. As he says in the film, there is an enormous gap between what people imagine sexual experience to be and what it is, and the film provides numerous examples. (Interview question to a couple: "How many sexual positions have you tried?" Answer: "There's more than one?") One only has to look at contemporary popular culture to realize that perception today is very different.
The film's production values are extraordinary given the limited budget. The film has a rich period look that transports you back into an era of much greater formality and reserve. The cinematography by Frederick Elmes (whose work I always enjoy) casts an odd kind of serenity over scene after scene in which mighty forces are churning just under the surface.
As an aside: I'd love to know how they got some of these scenes past the MPAA. I can't remember a recent film from a major studio that had so much male full frontal nudity. The scene with Kinsey lecturing to a room full of students shocked by the explicit photographs he's projecting in giant enlargements is almost guaranteed to have people in the theater audience squirming. But writer-director Condon is smart enough to relieve the tension with a joke, which I won't spoil here.
M.
"Most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything." -- Chinatown
"What kind of movies would there be if everyone in them had to do what we thought they should do?" -- Roger Ebert
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