Movie Notes: Kinsey

September 2nd, 2006

Kinsey
Kinsey: Liam Neeson and Laura Linney compare notes.

= 3 stars

Starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney
Directed by Bill Condon

Amazon link

Movies Kinsey is a calculatingly unsexy movie about sex, which makes sense as Kinsey the scientist approached the subject from the unemotional, unjudgemental viewpoint of a researcher. It’s a biopic along the lines of Ray, The Aviator, or Tucker, with some important differences.

For starters, Tucker falls into the mold of the person who was ahead of his time, and since their mindset is so obviously right compared to “the way we used to think” we’re immediately on their side and the film becomes a “me against the world” type theme, where we see the visionary beat down by the system repeatedly, yet are with them every step of the way. In Kinsey, it’s not so clear cut that what Kinsey (Liam Neeson) did was “right” and there’s always a slight uncomfortable feeling as he preaches his thoughts that sex should be out in the open, discussed over the dinner table with your teenage daughters. His quest is ultimately flawed in the sense that he’s unaware that through removing emotion and love from sex, he’s unlikely to get society to paradigm-shift towards him. So it’s not a paint-by-numbers biography by any means.

The film’s treatment of sex deserves credit and alternately shows how far we’ve come and still have yet to go towards a frank treatment of sexual subject matter in movies. First, it’s worth noting the typical sex movie scene is filmed in a glorified manner, from unusual angles and with exciting music behind, as if it’s a religious experience or athletic event. So when two people display bad, innocent sex in Kinsey, it’s a breath of fresh air. One is reminded of a nature video where a lion humps a lioness and the look on the latter’s face is one of utter boredom. For some reason, I’m willing to bet more people’s sex lives lean towards that nature than the Hollywood “pumping music” version.

However, on the other side, it’s still not acceptable to depict graphically much of what the film discusses, despite its basis in a book published decades ago. I suppose in some sense choices were made to not sink the film into a direction that would distract people from it’s actual theme: The man behind the work.

What is at Kinsey’s core is not sex, it’s the story of how a determined man’s history shapes his life’s work to change society, and whether or not he achieves anything of greatness is ultimately left for that society to decide. Which is probably true for all of us to some degree.

IMDB: Kinsey
Wikipedia: Kinsey
Rotten Tomatoes: Kinsey 89%