November 18-24, 2004

movies

Do It Again

hitting the spot: Liam Neeson is the center of attention in Kinsey.

Kinsey brings the famed sexologist back just when we need him most.

Kinsey

by Cindy Fuchs

"Don't sit so far away." Kinsey begins with an interview, or more precisely, a series of interviews cut together. Even more precisely, these are practice interviews, with Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) sitting across from his young, eager researchers, teaching them how to ask direct questions, how to affect interest but not judgment, how to fill out the 287 boxes on each interviewee's answer sheet, and how close to sit. Such attention to every detail of the process is typical of Kinsey, a renowned obsessive when it came to his work.

The fact that his work was sex made Kinsey something of a sensation during his lifetime. It also makes him alarmingly relevant today, as conservative movements increasingly seek to close down sex education, equal rights based on sexual identity, even discussions about sex (and evolution, for that matter). The same battles Kinsey waged half a century ago are now resurrected with the resurgence of censorship, intolerance and repression stemming from fear of sexual behaviors, desires and differences—the very objects of Kinsey's pioneering studies.

How strange this argument would be to Kinsey, whose dedication to science—as an abstraction and mode of thinking—led him to reject moral judgments so that he might discover the ways that desires create social and political systems, dictate norms and create uncertainties. Following his discovery in 1938 that there were no scientific resources with which to teach a marriage course at Indiana University, Kinsey made it his mission to document and classify how people understand and have sex. When his first massive study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was published in 1948, he became a celebrity—only partly reluctantly. Early on, Kinsey understood the power his stardom might wield. He put every bit of money or clout back into his work.

As they recur throughout the film, Kinsey's interviews serve as a structural motif, a frame on which to hang a set of biographical flashbacks. So you learn that his father (John Lithgow) was an ornery Methodist and Sunday school teacher, determinedly preaching the evils of even thinking about sex. Just so, young Al grows up inhibited but also curious, his scientific bent emerging early enough to upset dad. (The fact that he goes on to attend Bowdoin College, study biology and psychology, earn a degree in taxonomy from Harvard, and dedicate himself to the study of a specific kind of gnat hardly ingratiates him with his father.) Their initial break (one of several dramatized in the film) comes when Al calls his father a "prig," whereupon his father accuses him of becoming a "shady person" who "keeps secrets."

Such secrets underlie much of the film, as Kinsey's own fears and longings are revealed by way of the interviews. Moreover, it is his job, by the time he embarks on the sex studies, to gather and write down other people's secrets and to try never to keep any of his own. Such resolute honesty leads to misunderstandings when he starts experimenting sexually. He feels the need to confess to his wife, the stunningly perceptive Clara McMillen (Laura Linney), whom he meets when he's a professor and she's a student at Indiana. He calls her "Mac," and she calls him "Prok," a nickname given by his students.

All these factual events—including the Kinseys' initial difficulty with sex (his penis is too large and her body needs adjusting) and his fateful decision, with Mac's help, to undertake his years-long study—appear in the film as bits of scenes, gestures toward plot that don't so much explain or even reveal the man's life as much as they set up the more intricate and less delineated emotional journeys both Kinsey and Mac undertake.

Perhaps most difficult to convey is Kinsey's passion for his work, partly perverse, partly admirable and partly wondrous. Mac stands in frequently for the audience, observing Kinsey's distress and awkwardness, offering sensible, endlessly patient advice whenever he comes to an impasse. But she is also, like the audience, on the outside. Thanks in large part to Neeson's careful performance, Kinsey appears here as a man of prodigious intelligence and brilliant insight who has predictable difficulties dealing with day-to-day social particulars.

His interactions with Indiana's administration (Oliver Platt as the generously inclined President Herman Wells) or fellow faculty (Tim Curry as the nastily competitive Thurman Rice) typically appear so that the imbalances of "intellectual" and "practical" concerns are sometimes comic, often tense—in rhythms that recall those of director Bill Condon's previous biography, the superbly nuanced Gods and Monsters. Still, Kinsey's mix of self-doubt and ego is hard to show. When he is reviled for his study of women's sexuality, which exposes uncomfortable minutiae about "mothers" and "daughters," he is "forgiven" in an awkward sort of movie closure scene as a lesbian (Lynn Redgrave) thanks him for "saving" her life. While such responses may be "true," in a broad or even particular sense, the scene feels tacked on, a way to explain too much in a few minutes.

At its best, Kinsey turns nearly impressionistic, as when it represents the doctor's increasingly convoluted relationships with his team, Wardell Pomeroy (Chris O'Donnell), Paul Gebhard (Timothy Hutton) and Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard). Kinsey's early sexual liaison with Clyde leads to some partner-swapping with Mac, and eventually, captured on film for research purposes, with the researchers' young wives. Unable to view these films (they're still locked away), Condon turns these images into fuzzy, wide-angled, black-and-white dreams, imagining how the team might have become wildly intimate under their ostensibly professional terms.

Kinsey offers a series of moments in the doctor's career, all multiply layered and connected to other moments. While, as Kinsey says here, "One of the aims of science is to simplify," art can only complicate.

Kinsey Written and directed by Bill Condon A Fox Searchlight release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

recommended