RSSKinsey
March 18th, 2006 | View Comments
Director: Bill Condon
Starring: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney
Rating: 
Buy Kinsey on Amazon.com
Watching this movie made me thankful that I live in a post-sexual revolution era and made me deeply frightened that there are people in this country who very much want to return to a time when people got married without knowing where babies came from and when consummating your marriage was both emotionally and physically painful.
Kinsey is the story of Alfred C. Kinsey, aka “Prok”, the famed sex researcher who is often credited with inspiring the sexual revolution. Overall, I think it handles a delicate subject pretty well. The film doesn’t shy away from any taboo subjects, but it also doesn’t cross the line into being obscene for obscenity’s sake.
The characters in the film are a little flat; very few of the characters aside from Kinsey show any sort of emotional development, and even Kinsey’s development is minimal, given that they establish his sexually rebellious streak early on. The chemistry between some of the couples is a little lacking; I actually thought that Kinsey’s wife, played by Laura Linney, was most alive in her scenes with Clyde Martin, played by Peter Sarsgaard.
There were a few moments in the film, one of Kinsey interviewing someone in a gay bar and two scenes near the end that seemed like Hollywood editorializing about gay and lesbian affairs. In the film, Kinsey’s initial motivations for conducting his sex research come across as partly a desire to help people achieve sexual satisfaction and mostly a nerdy desire to amass and crunch data. Thus, it’s not clear to me if the few activist statements he makes at the end are true to Kinsey’s character in real life, or if they were inserted by scriptwriters to make a political point.
The film barely addresses one of the main criticisms leveled at Kinsey, that the data he obtained on orgasms in children must have been obtained with the help of pedophiles, whose identities he then kept secret. There is a scene in which Kinsey and Pomeroy (Chris O’Donnell) interview a pedophile and then Pomeroy storms out in disgust, but that’s the end of the matter.
I did enjoy the film a lot–parts of it I found laugh-out-loud, hold-your-stomach funny. It’s definitely worth the rental fee if you haven’t seen it, but I don’t know if I’d buy it.
Yvonne posted this on March 18th, 2006 @ 11:38am in Movie Reviews | Permalink to "Kinsey"
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