KINSEY by Bill Condon
by Andre Soares
Kinsey (2004)
Direction and screenplay: Bill Condon. (There’s a "thank you" credit to Kinsey biographer Johnathan Gathorne-Hardy and to his book, Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things.) . Cast: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Lynn Redgrave
ALL TALK, LITTLE ACTION
At one point in Kinsey, Liam Neeson, as the polemical Dr. Alfred Kinsey, tells a reporter that it would be "useless" to make a film of his 1948 tome on male sexuality. Be that as it may, even Kinsey himself would probably have recognized that his difficult, extraordinary life could well be the stuff that great movies are made of. Writer-director Bill Condon surely thinks so, and his Kinsey is an honorable attempt to portray the life and times of the pioneering sex researcher, whose studies on the sexual behavior of American men and women remain controversial to this day. But despite Condon’s good intentions, Kinsey is ultimately no more than a well-crafted, formulaic "message" biopic that sanitizes its subject matter while pretending to be as revolutionary in its approach to sex as its offbeat hero.
Much of the film is told via flashbacks, with Kinsey acting as a subject of his own experiment by answering questions about his past. We learn about his father, a rabidly religious part-time church lecturer who believed that sex was a necessary evil for procreation — but only then. (This anti-sex crusader is played with half-crazed glee by John Lithgow, who seems to be having way too much fun with the role.) We also learn that in the perverse environment in which Kinsey — and millions of others — grew up, non-procreational sex had to be made dangerous. Cunnilingus, we’re told, will lead to sterility. Masturbation will lead to blindness and to a whole array of fates worse than death. Or, via internal bleeding, even to death itself.
When Kinsey rebels against his father’s psychotic views on sex, he goes to the other extreme: from absolute sexual repression to absolute sexual liberation. Whether he ever felt pangs of the old Christian guilt is never discussed in the film. According to Condon, Kinsey was a one-man sex lib movement. In his view, sex, whether with males, females, or both, was a natural means of human expression. In fact, he encourages his assistants and even his wife to be equally liberated. According to Kinsey, it doesn’t take much convincing for the (almost invariably off-camera) fun to begin.
With the 1948 publication of his first bestseller, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey becomes an internationally known figure. From then on, things begin going wrong for him. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, is greeted with outrage and disgust. American society had stared at itself in the bedroom mirror and it wasn’t at all happy with the reflection. In the puritanical and paranoid 1950s, the controversial doctor is accused of being both a pervert and a Communist. (Had Kinsey been around in the early 21st century, the rabid right would surely have accused him of "aiding the terrorists.")
All of the above is rich material for a great film, but Bill Condon offers little more than a superficial, derivative history lesson. Like Paul Muni in The Story of Louis Pasteur, Edward G. Robinson’s syphilis researcher in Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, and myriad other film geniuses, Kinsey is obsessed with his work. And like in most previous biopics, the drama that ensues feels artificial and contrived. For instance, Kinsey’s awareness of his homosexual side comes as no surprise to his young, bisexual assistant, Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard), even though apart from a subtle "plant" earlier in the film there had been absolutely no indication of the professor’s two-way sexual orientation.
Later on, Clyde’s angry outburst against Kinsey’s "open door" sex policies seems both self-righteous and phony. Condon, via his film character, is sermonizing that sexual liberation leads to unforeseen nasty consequences (in this case, infidelity and jealousy), as if Clyde and all the other willing participants in Kinsey’s free-sex experimentations were little children unaware of the emotional entanglements of sexual activity. (Curiously, there’s only a brief mention of condom use in the film; no one was apparently much afraid of venereal diseases or unwanted pregnancies.)
Like the controversial hero of another biopic, Dustin Hoffman’s Lenny Bruce in Lenny, Kinsey is ostracized because he dares tell the uncomfortable truth to a hypocritical society that wants none of it. But unlike Hoffman’s neurotic and abrasive stand-up comedian, Condon’s Kinsey is an eccentric but wholly likable fellow. And therein lies the film’s biggest flaw. Since this is a (mostly) American movie, we can accept hunky Liam Neeson playing the role of the hound-faced Alfred Kinsey, a carbon copy of actor Tom Ewell (the quasi-errant husband in The Seven Year Itch). But it is difficult to accept a sex-obsessed hero who is hardly ever shown enjoying the pleasures of sex. Even if Kinsey was more interested in documenting sex than actually experiencing it (something that is not true according to his biographers), were those clinical experiments a form of erotic stimulation? That’s a taboo subject matter as far as Condon is concerned.
Thus, we have a film about sex that is terrified of sensuality. Juvenile and clinical discussions about sex are allowed, but real eroticism and the dreaded NC-17 rating are to be avoided at all costs. Most of the performances suffer as a result, since we see those people more like lab rats than real, sensual human beings. Neeson’s power, in particular, is diminished. Despite a realistic kissing scene with Clyde and a couple of sexual moments with his wife, Kinsey comes across as a bland, asexual observer. Neeson is a capable player (as long as he doesn’t have to cry), and he could have been considerably more forceful — if less "likable" — had the film actively dealt with Kinsey’s unconstrained sexual behavior (including his reported masochistic tendencies), his arrogance (e.g., Kinsey ignored warnings by some scientists that his methodology was flawed), and his obsession with — or ruthlessness in — getting case histories (including those of pedophiles).
Laura Linney’s Clara is more an appendix than an actual character. Like countless other devoted film wives, Clara is the one who brings the researchers refreshments, cries when her husband strays, and acts as pacifier during family squabbles. Given the limitations of this underwritten and — apart from the extra-marital sex — conventional role, Linney does surprisingly well.
A few of the other supporting players are also quite capable, including a handful of bit players ("I invented it," one hilarious elderly woman — referring to masturbation — confides to the researchers) and Oscar winner Timothy Hutton, who is effective in a small role as one of Kinsey’s assistants — and who, if there is any cinematic justice, will one day star as Dr. Kinsey in a truly fearless version of the researcher’s life.
But the acting highlight of the film is the appearance of Lynn Redgrave, nearly unrecognizable under a Doris Day wig, as the final on-screen subject of the Kinsey study. Redgrave’s talking head unleashes a firestorm of pathos that is noticeably absent from the rest of the film. In that single moment, Kinsey is miraculously transformed into a movie about flesh-and-blood human beings.
Had Condon managed to convey throughout his film half the amount of sheer humanness generated in the Redgrave scene, Kinsey would have been a masterpiece. As it is, this moderately daring biopic is an adequate look at the life of a controversial and still relevant figure whose revolutionary work, if performed in the United States, would be as misconstrued today as it was more than half a century ago. Much has changed, Redgrave’s thankful character tells Dr. Kinsey. Sadly, however, much still remains the same.
Synopsis:
Having been raised by his sexually repressed father (Lithgow), an engineering teacher and occasional Sunday school lecturer who saw the sex demon everywhere he turned, the young Alfred Kinsey (Neeson) extricates himself from parental control by taking up scientific studies at Indiana University. There, Kinsey devotes himself to the study of gall wasps, obsessively collecting thousands of specimens across North America.
While teaching, Kinsey meets Clara McMillen (Linney), a student who’s as attracted to him as he is attracted to gall wasps. They eventually marry, but their sexual inexperience leads to serious marital problems. When a visit to a doctor solves their sexual issues, Kinsey realizes that science can be a great tool to educate people about both sex and life.
Sometime later, Kinsey starts lecturing in a marriage course at Indiana University. Having learned about the evils of psychotic sex-phobia from his own father, Kinsey approaches different forms of sexual expression with a non-judgmental mind — not only in his classroom and in his lab, but also in his private life. A "3" in the homosexual-heterosexual scale (the Kinsey scale goes from "0" to "6"), he engages in both homosexual and heterosexual activities — the former with an assistant researcher, the latter with his wife.
Realizing how ignorant Americans are about sex, Kinsey devotes himself to the study of sexual behavior with the same passion that he had displayed while observing gall wasps. The first publication of his work, covering male sexuality, is well received, but the second one, covering female sexuality, is greeted with enormous outrage by religious and right-wing groups. Since this is the paranoid 1950s, Kinsey is inevitably accused of being a Communist. The Rockefeller Foundation, whose grants had been crucial to Kinsey’s research, withdraws its support. Now in ill health, the scientist is left on his own (with his ever-devoted wife by his side) to continue amassing as many sexual histories as he can.
Notes:
Alfred (1894-1956) and Clara Kinsey had four children. Only three are shown in the film. Their firstborn, Don, died from diabetes shortly before his fifth birthday. Clara Kinsey died in 1982 at the age of 83.
In the film, Clyde Martin is seen seducing Alfred Kinsey. In reality, Kinsey pursued Clyde, who became the sex researcher’s somewhat reluctant sex partner.
Kinsey never saw his father after his parents divorced. In the film, Kinsey is shown at his father’s home after his mother dies.
Indiana University came up with the money necessary to fund Kinsey’s research after the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its support due to pressure from right-wing and religious leaders. In the film, the university board members decline the chance to support the researcher.
The sole woman at the Indiana University board meetings, Mrs. Spaulding, is played by actress Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn’s niece. Houghton played Hepburn’s daughter and Sidney Poitier’s love interest in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).
Following the confiscation of sexually related materials by the Indianapolis customs collector in 1950, the Kinsey Institute sued U.S. Customs. Although not mentioned in the film, the Institute won the legal battle in Federal District Court in 1957. By then, Kinsey had been dead for a year.
According to Kinsey Institute Senior Research Fellow and former director John Bancroft, politically motivated anti-Kinsey factions have focused on the subject of child/adult sexual contact to discredit the researcher because "in recent years, when there has been anxiety bordering on hysteria about child sexual abuse, often resulting in circumstances where the accused is regarded as guilty until proved innocent, what better way to discredit someone?" The Kinsey Institute has publicly denied the accusations, asserting that Dr. Kinsey never conducted experiments with children. Condon’s film only touches on the subject once, when we see Kinsey explaining to a pedophile that he doesn’t condone forced sex.
Although only barely mentioned in the film, the Kinsey methodology has been much criticized because of the samples used in his studies. The survey group was composed of mostly volunteer subjects (as opposed to random samples); about 25% of them were, or had been, prison inmates; and 5% were male prostitutes. Kinsey was warned by prominent psychologists about the unreliability of data based on information originating mainly from volunteers, but the researcher refused to consider the criticism. In addition, Kinsey’s statistical methodologies and incomplete demographic data have been put into question.
Yet, despite those flaws, Kinsey’s studies may ultimately be no more inaccurate or tendentious than modern studies on human sexuality. In a critique of one of Kinsey’s biographers, Dr. Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY, wrote in The Nation:
Paul Gebhard (one of Kinsey’s co-authors and his successor as director of the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research — he retired in 1982), himself reacting to criticism leveled against the two volumes [Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)], spent years "cleaning" the Kinsey data of its purported contaminants — removing, for example, all material derived from prison populations in the basic sample. In 1979, Gebhard, with Alan Johnson, published The Kinsey Data, and — to his own surprise — found that Kinsey’s original estimates held: Instead of Kinsey’s 37 percent, Gebhard and Johnson came up with 36.4 percent; the 10 percent figure [for homosexual behavior/orientation] (with prison inmates excluded) came to 9.9 percent for white, college-educated males and 12.7 percent for those with less education. And as for the call for a "random sample," a team of independent statisticians studying Kinsey’s procedures had concluded as far back as 1953 that the unique problems inherent in sex research precluded the possibility of obtaining a true random sample, and that Kinsey’s interviewing technique had been "extraordinarily skillful." They characterized Kinsey’s work overall as "a monumental endeavor."
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