It has been almost 57 years since Alfred Kinsey published his groundbreaking, taboo-shattering scientific research study of sexuality in America, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
Judging by the several people who walked out in the middle of a preview showing of Kinsey, Bill Condon's often graphic biographical film about Kinsey and his work, some of us still aren't comfortable with frank discussions of sex more than a half-century later.
Late in the film, when a reporter asks Kinsey (Liam Neeson) whether Hollywood would turn Sexual Behavior in the Human Male into a film, considering that it had zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists and made Kinsey a household name, he shyly replies that he doesn't see how it could.
Yet here it all is in Kinsey, plus a peel-away-the-shutters look at the good doctor himself. Condon's film doesn't leave much to the imagination on either count. Nudity, sexual positions, homosexuality, masturbation and much explicit chatter about all these things and more are in plain view. It's often surprising, even shocking.
Yet for all that, Kinsey, like Neeson's playing of the research scientist, is surprisingly dry.
He was, after all, a scientist who had spent much of his life as a biologist at Indiana University studying the tiny gall wasp. He'd collected hundreds of thousands of gall wasp specimens, carefully cataloging each one. It wasn't until 1938, when the 44-year-old Kinsey was asked to teach a marriage course, that he realized there was precious little information to be had about human sexuality. So he went about studying human sexuality, with the same methodical methods he used to study the gall wasp.
He enlisted assistants to crisscross the country, carefully prodding people in all walks of life to open up about their most secret sexual practices. "Human beings are just bigger, more complicated versions of the gall wasp," he said.
But what Kinsey and his research assistants uncovered blew the lid off puritanical America and created an international sensation. People were not just practicing sex according to the limited strictures of the Old Testament, he found, but were experimenting, harboring desires frowned on in polite society and just generally fooling around. "America is awash in sexual activity," he discovered.
Although Kinsey was seen by some as a creator of the sexual revolution, Kinsey asserts that he was just the messenger, reporting things that were going on in private for generations.
But as much as the film is about his earthshaking study of sexuality, Kinsey also peels away the mask of this cautious, if curious man. A scene in which he experiments with homosexuality and gets kissed full on the mouth by another man, drew titters and uncomfortable squirms from some in the audience. Yet, as portrayed, it seems one more link in his research. Still, his later confession of that infidelity to his wife, Clara "Mac" McMillen (Laura Linney), leaves her with a sinking feeling . . . until she hops into bed with the same bisexual partner as her husband!
This doesn't really seem all that odd in the context of Kinsey, where casual family dinner table chatter often revolves around discussions of sex in frank technical detail.
Neeson plays Kinsey as a thoughtful, careful man, a pale shadow of the man one might expect to have caused an international sensation. He's determined to complete his scientific studies, and later is traumatized by the irate public reception to his followup book on human sexuality in the human female published in 1953. It presented women in a sexual, no longer saintly, light.
The outcry against Sexual Behavior in the Human Female even led to a congressional hearing in which Kinsey was branded a communist!
Condon, whose previous film was Gods and Monsters, about openly gay Frankenstein director James Whale (Condon also received an Oscar nomination for his movie script for Chicago), explores Kinsey's personal life to show how it tied into his research.
Condon shows how Kinsey's curiosity about sexual matters was as much a product of his own background as a need to broaden knowledge. There's a moment at a lakeside when the teenage Kinsey seems about to jump on top of his male Eagle Scout companion. A product of a repressed home headed by a belittling father (John Lithgow), it's no wonder Kinsey's sexual feelings had to be locked away for so long.
Lithgow makes a towering presence as papa Kinsey, putting down just about everyone. But later in the film, Lithgow makes a remarkable transformation when this dominant father figure agrees to be interviewed by his son on his sexuality, opening up in a surprisingly poignant and dramatic way.
As the film progresses, Kinsey loses public respect and is labeled a smut peddler. Neeson shows the toll this takes on Kinsey's health and his psyche, becoming weary, drawn and frail looking.
Similarly, Linney's Mac, so fiery and vibrant in early scenes, a true complementary character to her husband, becomes more of a shadowy caregiver, trying to keep her husband's flame from flickering out as he faces more and more rejections.
Powerful, too, is Lynn Redgrave (who also co-starred in Condon's Gods and Monsters). She delivers what becomes Kinsey's epilogue; an ordinary woman who confesses how Kinsey's research gave her comfort and a reason to keep going.
As Kinsey's research probes more deeply, a frequent question asked back at him was, "Am I normal?" It was Kinsey's contention that people just wanted to be like their imagined perceptions of everyone else, even if they had to subvert their own feelings.
When you leave Kinsey, the "Am I normal?" question may reverberate in a new light.
***1/2
Kinsey
Starring: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker, Lynn Redgrave.
Rated: R, contains sex, nudity, profanity, adult themes.
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