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Kinsey Our rating: Rate this movie   MPAA rating: R (for pervasive sexual content, including some graphic images and descriptions) Theater release: November 12, 2004 by Fox Searchlight Pictures Directed by: Bill Condon Runtime: 1 hour 58 minutes Cast: Liam Neeson (Alfred Kinsey), Laura Linney (Clara McMillen), Chris O'Donnell (Wardell Pomeroy), John Lithgow (Alfred Seguine Kinsey), Oliver Platt (Herman Wells) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Editor's note: This R-rated film is very frank in its discussions about sexuality, and this review thus includes some sexual terminology that some readers might find offensive.

There are two ways to handle a highly controversial issue, especially when you are looking at the form it took several decades ago, before our culture had settled into its current attitudes and assumptions. For example, you could go the route of Vera Drake, Mike Leigh's exquisitely detailed and complex study of abortions both legal and illegal in 1950s England; while Leigh himself has said that he is pro-choice, his film does not adopt any particular stance on the issue, and indeed, he even gives us room to wonder just how naive the title character is and how much harm she may be causing.

Liam Neeson plays the controversial sex researcher Alfred Kinsey

Or you could go the route of Kinsey, Bill Condon's triumphalist depiction of the sexologist whose studies of human sexual behavior shocked and outraged post-war America. Rather than cause any similar disturbance to present-day audiences, the film mocks the sexual attitudes of the past from a safe distance while flattering us for our supposed sexual enlightenment, and it recounts in detail Alfred Kinsey's battles against sexual prudery—is this really a pressing issue nowadays?—while minimizing some of his more unsettling "scientific" methods.

The film begins at the turn of the 20th century, as Kinsey's Methodist father (John Lithgow) preaches a stern message against the perils of the modern age; phones, cars, and moving picture shows have all contributed to a decline in morals, he says. Kinsey himself is a boy scout who, together with his friends, is not quite sure what to make of the medically iffy advice their manuals have given them on the subject of masturbation and nocturnal emissions (will they really go blind or become insane?). By the time the adult Kinsey (Liam Neeson) meets and marries Clara McMillen (Laura Linney), he has become an expert on gall wasps, collecting tens of thousands of specimens in order to study their evolution from generation to generation. The Kinsey marriage gets off to a bad start, when the wedding night turns out to be more painful than they had anticipated, especially for Clara—but Kinsey quickly realizes that this, like all other problems, must have a scientific solution, and so they go looking for an expert who can solve it for them. Years of sexual bliss follow.

Then comes the fateful day that Kinsey turns his attention from insect behavior to the human kind. Convinced that his university students are not getting adequate information on sexuality, Kinsey institutes a "marriage" course that gives his students the facts of life, complete with X-rated photos which, apparently, can be shown in a film that has only an R rating. (It's one of the film's in-jokes that the uptight moralist who teaches the more old-fashioned class on sex, and who doesn't seem to recognize the sexual euphemisms tossed his way by the students, is played by Tim Curry, who will forever be known as the "sweet transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania" in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.)

Laura Linney plays the role of Clara McMillen

Emboldened by his success, Kinsey secures funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and begins to conduct a nationwide survey on sexual behavior; instead of letting people assume what "normal" sexual activity should be, he is determined to find out what people actually are doing, and to let the chips fall where they may. This requires Kinsey and his assistants to adopt a non-judgmental attitude when conducting interviews—all in the interests of science, of course—but, as Kinsey himself no doubt intends, it could also mean adopting a non-judgmental attitude with regard to moral standards outside the survey, as well. And so, on one of his research trips, Kinsey embarks on an affair with Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), an assistant of his who, before long, propositions Clara as well.

Kinsey the man and Kinsey the film have attracted no small amount of condemnation from critics, many of them faith-based, who accuse his studies of being little more than propaganda for sexual immorality, whether it be promiscuity, bestiality, even pedophilia; Kinsey's studies are also the source for that popular but long since discredited statistic that ten percent of the population is homosexual. But the problem with Kinsey's studies, at least as they are portrayed here, runs much deeper than mere morality; one thing that is completely missing from Kinsey's life and work, or at least from this film's depiction of them, is any sense of the fact that human sexuality has a fundamentally sacred component and cannot be reduced to the breeding instincts of wasps and rodents.

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