Kinsey
Matinee with Snacks
What blows my mind about this excellent film is the nature of the backlash against it. The negative responses have been from, surprise, the conservative and/or religious groups, whose teachings throughout the centuries are exactly why the studies done by this pioneer sex researcher were essential. Liam Neeson stars as Alfred "Prok" Kinsey, whose 1948 best-seller and scientific text "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" turned the world on its ear merely by stating the truth about its subjects. The truth is always uncomfortable to the repressive, because it threatens the very mythology that keeps them in power, or keeps the ignorant compliant in fear of an imagined truth.
This film is absolutely a must-see for anyone rankling at the puritanical trends resurfacing in the US after so much groundwork has been laid to eliminate the repressive barriers to education and communication. Writer/director Bill Condon (who also helmed the story of director James Whale) finds the humanity in this man who always studied humanity from the outside. The uproar about the film (especially considering it consists of events that have already happened and this cat will not get back in the bag any time soon) reminds us how far we still have not come. Vanessa Redgrave's short scene at the end reminds us how important Kinsey's ground-laying was, and how important education and communication is to all things human.
Kinsey, upon discovering his own sexuality upon marrying his virgin bride (underplayed with her usual delicacy by Laura Linney), comes to rail against the current modes of educating young people about one of the primary functions of their bodies. Sex is as fundamental to human and vertebrate existence as eating and sleeping, yet misplaced moral codes - or, as Kinsey puts it, morality disguised as fact - have caused incalculable pain, confusion, even disease and unwanted abortions. His upbringing in rural Indiana, raised by a father (John Lithgow) more warped and misguided than himself, inspires his work. He never stops being a scientist, and yet people mistake his methods for his motives.
Conservatives and Christian moralists and other people who want to pretend that the human is not a sexual being, and who think that ignoring the elephant in the room will make it never exist, decry the film as a canonization of the man they basically blame for the entire sexual revolution, including all the evils they perceive as arising directly from people knowing more about sex and sexuality: divorce rates, child abuse, and STDs. Naturally, any person who reads more than 10 words a year knows that these things went on before people talked about them, and have for centuries. Divorce wasn't invented in the 1960's, but long, long before. Homosexuality is present in all mammalian species. Adults and children the world over know sexual abuse isn't a result of someone getting a clever idea from a scientific text. Certainly after all the scandals, we all know it's not confined only to the "disreputable" in society.
I should also point out that the film hardly paints Kinsey to be a saint, though it is clearly grateful for the work that he started, however flawed his methods might have been. We can easily forget that medical science started with some flawed theories and methods as well; it seems cruel to fault a man for his methods when he was so passionately driven to educate the world to prevent the suffering his own loved ones (including himself, and so many of his subjects) endured. Someone had to start it.
I quote biographer James H. Jones from the Washington Post, as it sums it up better than I ever could. I apologize for passing the buck, but this is an important movie and I want to bring out the big guns. "In his eagerness to learn everything he could about human sexuality, Kinsey was a vacuum cleaner, and he had absolutely no standards about censorship or passing moral judgmentŠI do see him as a principal architect of the sexual revolution, but as a historian, I also know that it is silly to put all of this at his door. The times were changing, but Kinsey also helped to change the times." One cannot be detached and biased when attempting to collect data; Kinsey was uniquely suited for this work.
Biographer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, who Condon sourced for his screenplay, also described it perfectly: "Kinsey felt he could only study [sex] by stripping away all but its physiological functions, first removing moral judgments, second, even harder, emotions and feelings. For both he was ideally equipped psychologically and for both he was savagely criticized." Moral judgement (and fear of being abnormal or fear of the unknown) leads to close-lipped non-communication and fear and then ultimately glamorizing the unknown more than any education would. Neeson as well is ideally equipped to play this role - as an actor I often find him very dry, and Kinsey's socially inept scientist (with what seems to be borderline autism in his inability to read a person's soul and intent), only takes things at face value, and yet has fierce passion to cure society's ills through his work, this plays perfectly in Neeson's energetic but flat affect.
My very minor complaint about the film was that I found some of the period details confusing and therefore had a bit of a struggle placing the events in the proper time frame. It was clear that our characters were aging and time was passing, but it was difficult to get a sense of when was what. However, that was only a slight distraction from a gripping and interesting biopic. Go see it and talk with your friends afterward. You'll be glad you did.
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
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