| Kinsey
Director: Bill Condon
Cast: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O' Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard
Category: III
Duration: 118 minutes
Kinsey is a well-written, intelligent biopic of the renowned
sexologist. Clearly its subject matter is a minefield: the
sexual behaviour of American men and women in the 20th century.
Kinsey published his book on men in 1948 and his book on women
in the early 50s. He was dead by 1956. He belongs to an era
when the subject matter was not spoken about publicly in the
United States, where research was limited and research and
interviewing techniques still in development. It was also
the era of the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and
hearings into Un-American activities. Looking at Kinsey at
the beginning of the 21st century, listening to its quite
frank screenplay, looking at some of its images, this is a
film that Kinsey might have only imagined and never believed
would be made.
Bill Condon wrote and directed the biography of director,
James Whale, Gods and Monsters. He also wrote the screenplay
for the film version of Chicago. His writing skills are in
evidence in the way that he has structured this biography,
how he has evoked Kinsey's very strict household, Kisney's
early career studying insects and producing research on thousands
of specimens, his move from insects to studying the variety
in human beings to the limited courses on sexuality in Indiana
universities in the 1930s, to his move towards his famous
research.
Kinsey has been blamed for everything that followed in the
decades after his death from the pill to gay marriages and
all kinds of permissiveness. In retrospect, it is clear that
psychologists from Freud, to sexologists from Havelock Ellis,
were moving the study of human sexuality to centre focus.
Kinsey was articulating this, uncovering taboos and enabling
doctors, philosophers, moralists to probe more deeply into
normal and aberrant behaviour.
Kinsey himself was a strong man who was not above being caught
up in the dangers that his investigations could lead to, permissiveness
in relationships, his own and those of his interviewers, to
same sex encounters. He was open to attacks concerning his
own moral stances - many of which were resurrected by American
groups and boycott movements on the release of this film.
With a respected actor like Liam Neeson playing Kinsey, there
is a gravity in the treatment and in the character study.
Laura Linney leads a wide-ranging supporting cast as his wife,
John Lithgow as his father and Peter Sarsgaard as his chief
researcher and confidant.
We all probably take a prurient curiosity into watching this
film. That is natural. What the film offers in the space of
two hours is an opportunity to understand Kinsey better in
his context and to evaluate what has happened in sex research,
writing and discussion in the ensuing fifty years.
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