'Don't sit so far away," says the off-screen voice, instructing a colleague on the proper way to conduct an interview. "Anything that creates a distance should be avoided."These are the first words that we hear in Kinsey, the much-anticipated new biopic from Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters), and they couldn't be more appropriate. After all, what better way to jump-start a movie about a man who dedicated his life to the study of human animals rubbing up against one another?
Friction, of course, was what Alfred Kinsey was all about. The so-called sexual revolution of the 20th century will be debated for as long as people care about such things (which is to say, forever), but Kinsey's place in it all is pretty much irrefutable. Dr. Kinsey scandalized America with his frank and thorough research on human sexuality back in the middle of the last century, a time (hard as it now is to believe) when no scientific surveys on the subject existed, when superstition and old wives' tales superseded hard knowledge. Back then, children, sex was all terra incognito.
When Kinsey published his Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, it was a lightning bolt to the heart of the culture, an unprecedented outpouring of data that outraged many and galvanized others. To some, the book signaled the impending undoing of a society previously thought united by a more-or-less common understanding of morality. To others, Kinsey's book was nothing less than a declaration of diversity delivered from on high, a confirmation that people had sex in all sorts of wacky ways, and that much of this activity had absolutely nothing to do with the requirements of society, marriage or even what was technically legal. According to this reading of Kinsey, we would all be better served in matters of the flesh by exchanging words like "right" and "wrong" with "common" and "less common."
It's a debate that set the stage for today's struggles over sexuality, and the movie Kinsey gamely lays it all out, a bit provocative around the edges, but never off-putting. (Despite what you may have heard, this movie isn't going to rock anyone's boat, unless they're already spoiling for a fight.) Kinsey doesn't exactly ignore the meatier, thornier implications of its own story, but it folds them neatly and a little too smoothly into quantities of more conventionally appealing bio-pic material, beginning with Liam Neeson in the title role as another Schindler for another moment, a flawed but benevolent facilitator of refugees seeking asylum of the sexual kind.
"I'm just a measurer," insists Kinsey — who throughout his career attempted the unenviable task of studying sex as an exclusively physiological process, divorced from the messiness of psychology and emotions — and we get the measure of the man almost immediately. Logical, even-tempered, polite, but also often blunt in his efforts to get at the truth, Kinsey comes off as the ultimate observer, a cross between Dragnet's Joe "Just the facts, ma'am" Friday and Star Trek's Mr. Spock. Good intentions aside, there's something a touch icy about this man of science, which is why Kinsey goes out of its way to warm him up for us. Kinsey may have been somewhat robotic in real life (think of him as the original sex machine), but Hollywood has never had much trouble making androids endearing, a feat accomplished here with the casting of Neeson, a supremely sympathetic actor, and by a sprinkling of carefully calculated insights into Kinsey's personal life and background.
The obligatory flashbacks reveal a boyhood of repression and butting heads with a domineering, puritanical father (John Lithgow) who railed against technological advances such as the zipper (an invention all but certain, according to the elder Kinsey, to assure speedy access to "moral oblivion"). Against this almost cartoonishly severe backdrop, young Kinsey finds himself seeking solace in nature and its creatures, replacing the religious dogma of his boyhood with an immersion in "the science of life." From there, it's a short step to teaching entomology at Indiana University, where he meets and marries a fellow scholar and bug enthusiast (Laura Linney) and makes the leap from studying copulating insects to copulating humans (whom he regards as "bigger, slightly more complicated gall wasps"). And then Kinsey's book is published, and the bodily fluids really hit the fan.
Kinsey becomes considerably more interesting and edgy in its second hour, when it gets some of that basic, human-interest stuff out of its system and begins showing us just how this guy went about unraveling the sexual secrets of a nation. There's one particularly devastating scene positioned at the movie's mid-point where the Kinsey crew conducts an interview with a subject who turns out to be an astonishingly loathsome and insatiable sexual predator — an encounter that puts to the test both the interviewers' impartiality and the movie's notion of normalcy existing in the eye of the beholder. It's a powerful moment, but it also carries a whiff of disappointment by hinting at the movie Kinsey might have been.
For all its historical scope and top-drawer credentials (from Condon's impeccably sculpted script to Frederick Elmes' luxurious camerawork to Carter Burwell's elegant, Merchant-Ivory-esque score), Kinsey rarely shows us its teeth. The film is smartly written, handsomely crafted, witty, sensitive and frequently thoughtful, but it's also a bit bloodless, at least for what this material would seem to demand. Call me unreasonable, but I expected more from a movie like this, coming out at a critical juncture like the one we're passing through — when definitions of sexuality are in radical flux and subject to ever increasing scrutiny and legislation. As you'd expect, there's plenty of frank sex talk here, and a few graphic images too, but rarely do we get a sense of danger, of something burning. Kinsey is carefully polished, coolly objective and a noble effort in almost every way, but I kept waiting for this movie to take off the white gloves, work up a little sweat and start yelling "Fire!"lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or letters@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2004.
