Kinsey

Plot synopsis:
Professor Alfred Kinsey is being interviewed about his sexual history. Interspersed with the interview, are flashbacks from his childhood and young-adulthood. The young child years show his father, a lay minister, denouncing modern inventions as leading to sexual sin, then in early adolescence, humiliating him in a store by denouncing its keeper for showing him cigarettes, while his adolescence shows his experiences as a Boy Scout and a late teenage scene shows Kinsey disappointing his father by his chosen vocational intentions. It then shows adult Kinsey teaching at Indiana University as a professor of biology lecturing on gall wasps.
Kinsey falls in love with a student in his class, whom he calls Mac, and marries her. Consummation of their marriage is difficult at first, because of a medical problem Mac has that is fixed easily with minor surgery, after which it is shown that she has an equally intense sexual appetite as her husband. Meanwhile, at the University, Professor Kinsey, who is affectionately called "Prok" by his graduate students, meets with students after hours to offer individual sexual advice.
Later, in a fictional scene where his mother has just died and Alfred is back at his parents' home with grieving friends and relatives - including his sister, who is overweight and thus considered too unattractive to get a husband, and his brother, who is possibly an early boomerang generation man who moved back home after losing his business - Kinsey shocks his father by telling him his "big secret": that he's doing a sex survey and wants his father to contribute his own sexual history to it.
At a book party celebrating Kinsey's latest publication on gall wasps, Kinsey approaches the dean of students about an open-forum sex education course as opposed to the anti-sex propaganda taught in a general health class. Eventually, it is approved, but on the grounds that it is open only to teachers, graduate or senior students, and married students. Nevertheless, Kinsey begins, teaching the sex course to a packed auditorium.
Kinsey continues to answer students' questions in personal meetings but finds his answers to be severely limited by the complete paucity of scientific data about human sexual behavior. This leads Kinsey to pass out questionnaires in his sexual education class from which he learns of the enormous disparity between what society had assumed people do and what their actual practices are. After securing financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey and his research assistants, including his closest assistant, Clyde Martin, travel the country, interviewing subjects about their sexual histories.
As time progresses Kinsey begins realizing that sexuality within humans, including himself, is a lot more varied than was originally thought. The range of expression he creates later becomes known as the Kinsey scale, which ranks overall sexuality from completely heterosexual to completely homosexual and everything in-between.
The first sexological book Kinsey publishes, which is on the sexual habits of the male, is a large-scale success and a best seller. Kinsey's research turns to women, which is met with more controversy. With the release of the female volume, support for Kinsey declines. McCarthyist pressures lead the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw its financial support, lest it be labeled "Communist" for backing the subversion of traditional American values.
Kinsey feels that he has failed everyone who has ever been a victim of sexual ignorance. A customs officer is tipped off to an importation of some of Kinsey's research material, which only exacerbates the financial situation of Kinsey's research organization. Kinsey suffers a heart attack, and is found to have developed an addiction to barbiturates. Meeting with other philanthropists fails to garner the support needed. Still, Kinsey continues his taking of sex histories.
The story returns to the initial interview with Kinsey, and he is asked about love and if he will ever attempt to conduct research on it. His response is that love is impossible to measure and impossible to quantify (and without measuring, he reminds us, there can be no science), but that it is important. The final scene is of Kinsey and his wife, pulling over to the side of the road for a nature walk. She remarks about a tree that has been there for a thousand years. Kinsey replies that the tree seems to display a strong love in the way its roots grip the earth. Afterwards, the two walk off together, Kinsey remarking "there's a lot of work to do".

Tags: psychological, queer

Review:
Bill Condon, working with his own material has come out with a movie that serves to illustrate how the work of Dr. Kinsey awoke the American public to a better understanding of their sexuality in ways no one, up to that point, had ever dared to show.
He was a man ahead of his times when he decided to gather information about the sex lives of Americans and to publish the results in a best selling book.As Dr. Kinsey, Liam Neeson, showing an uncanny resemblance to the man, himself, does a wonderful job.
And, logically enough, numerous scenes do happen at the dining table: sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, as played by Liam Neeson, chatters about sexual statistics over family backyard cookouts with his teenaged children, regales guests with graphic details of sexual minutiae at elegant affairs and ultimately ends up becoming a crashing bore at dinner parties as his compulsion to ramble on about all things sexual dominates his every conversation and waking thought.
At one point, Kinsey interviews a creepy subject played by William Sadler who has maintained a detailed record of all of the thousands of people he has had sex with (including children) and the implication is clear that he and Kinsey are two sides of the same coin -- both justifying their amoral pursuits in the name of intellectual enrichment.Throughout the movie all things sexual are treated comically and seriously, trivially and ponderously, casually and obsessively.
Even the few sexual scenes involving Kinsey and his wife (Laura Linney) seem designed to illustrate an academic point, coming off as being more like classroom visual aids rather than moments of passion.
What would on surface seem unfilmable is done with great sensitivity and honesty.Condon knows how to tell stories about real people (Gods and Monsters), and here is a life filled with curiosity and far reaching accomplishment.Raised in a repressed family dominated by a stern father, Kinsey is portrayed as an isolated teen who rebels against not only his father, but against sexual convention.
One also gets the feeling that someone either read the script or saw a working print of the film and had to gently point out to Condon that women simply get short shrift, so suddenly an extremely poignant coda is added, with Lynn Redgrave as a very moving interviewee on how Kinsey's work affected her life directly.
A rather well researched, interesting and involving biography of an important man to science, the film not only provides an insight into Kinsey's life and the attitudes of the time, but it also digs deep into the characters.
Back from a much-too-long hiatus after 1998's masterful character study of James Whale, Gods and Monsters, writer/director Bill Condon gives us a slightly more conventional biopic of important and (sadly) controversial scientist Alfred Kinsey.
Condon starts the film with a clever, exquisitely realized montage that alternates Kinsey training his team of assistants at the beginning of his sex research days in the late 1940s with flashbacks of Kinsey's childhood up until the time when he was a young adult.
We also see a couple other events emphasizing a general paucity of accurate sex education/information in the culture.It takes awhile to get through all of the above, and some viewers might feel a twinge of impatience ("when are we going to get to the sex stuff?"--a cry also frequently heard whenever there is mixed company), but Condon, through selective biography, has tied all of Kinsey's background together, with no superfluous details, in what functionally becomes a clever argument suggesting that the only thing that Kinsey could have done in his later years was to study sex in the way that he did.Condon and Neeson easily paint a complex picture of Kinsey as a sex researcher.
A long sequence of Kinney traveling across the country and interviewing all different kinds of people is refreshingly different and effective, especially as floating heads recede in the frame like passing highway dividing lines before quickly morphing into each other.The make-up, which has to age the principals 30 years or so, is masterfully done--at beginning of the film, you'll find yourself saying, "Geez, Liam Neeson, John Lithgow et al look young for their age", and at the end, "Geez, they look old for their age".
But, most especially, it is a fine film that aptly portrays both the research & intimate passions of the world famous US sexologist, Kinsey.It's not necessarily an adults-only film; depending upon how well prepared & educated teens are in studies of human sexual behavior.
Kinsey indeed did the nation a favor when he published his studies of the sex habits of the American male and female and the nation finally got a chance to see what was actually being done sexually versus the repressive conventions of the times that had many people believing that they were sexually abnormal.
By the late 1920's in America, Freud's elementary findings on sexual behavior motivated Alfred Kinsey to initiate research that purported the yearnings of many people nationwide about exposing their intimate desires concerning sex!!
This film depicts Kinsey's determination to attain knowledge about the historical importance of research and development germane to human sexual behavior which altered the lifestyle patterns of American living!!
I think Neeson has a strong chance at winning an Oscar this year; as does Laura Linney, playing Kinsey's wife, a terrifically kind, warm woman trying to keep up with Kinsey's life, which moves along pretty fast.
Neeson shows him as a strong man, but one with as many flaws as the gall wasps he collected, all buried deep beneath his drive and focus.Kinsey's studies proved some things, and let a lot of homosexuality and other deviances from the norm at the time out into the open.
Other things I do not agree with, like Kinsey's studies on the time it takes really young children to reach orgasmand Kinsey's way of thinking that sex on its basic level should have no emotional attachment; I think I can say that these things are ethically wrong without feeling ignorant.But I won't be biased against the quality of the film because of this.
It doesn't show both sides of Kinsey's argument, it merely dismisses Lithgow  and those like him  as a laughing stock, instead of considering any validity in points that they're making.This problem is carried throughout the movie, and Lithgow is seen as such a monster that we feel no sympathy for his character in a later scene showing his inner weakness and tragic past, the scene feels thrown in and very foreign to the rest of the movie.I think the opening scenes, with Kinsey and Clara first falling for each other, and his proposal and collection of gall wasps, are the movie's best, I believe.
But, it is a known fact that he regularly filmed the volunteered sex acts of his co-workers in the attic of his own home.Throughout the mid-1940s - Out of the thousands of people (of all ages, all across the USA) who were interviewed by Kinsey and his colleagues it was surprisingly revealed (through these extensive studies) just how commonplace oral sex, homosexuality, adultery, and masturbation (which, back then, was believed to cause serious mental illness) were amongst the American population, in general.One of this film's major downfalls was that it tried, far too earnestly, to cover too much ground in its 2-hour running time.
And, with that, it seriously lost its way by the time that its last half-hour rolled around.All-in-all - This film, which talk-talk-talks about sex like no other film around, was, for the most part, well-worth a view regardless of its flukes, its flaws and its somewhat uneven editing.P.S.Actor Liam Neeson was 52 (and he looked it) when he played the title character in this film.
Today, as a result of free sex and a drug culture that resulted from the sexual revolution, the number of venereal diseases had more than doubled and they are either ultimately fatal or difficult to treat because they have become resistant to antibiotics.If Kinsey had dwelt on how to improve sexual relations in marriage, he would have accomplished much but by reducing the human race down to a basic sexual animal he helped destroy thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and unfortunately, the movie fails to bring out the evil he caused..
But when Martin wants to go back to some straight sex and, in the name of the research, suggests to sleep with Mac, she jovially responses "I think I might like that", right in the presence of Kinsey!I like the way the movie ends, in a spiritually intimate moment of the Kinseys in the natural beauty of the red wood forest.
It was impossible to like the main character, and hence the entire movie was painful to watch.In a particularly annoying series of scenes, Dr. Kinsey has trouble getting funding for his research on human sexuality.
The film follows the development of this great man's research into human sexuality in a completely unflinching and uncompromising manner, one quite in keeping with the approach used by Kinsey himself.
It became a running joke for me to shout out, "worst family dinner scene ever", "worst wedding scene ever", "worst funeral scene ever" (et cetera) simply because, no kidding, Kinsey couldn't restrain himself from a creepily frank discussion of sex in each of these contexts.Of course, this is all in the good old tradition (read: "hackneyed movie cliché") of the Dedicated Scientist Character Who Can't Behave Like A Normal Person In Society (henceforth referred to as "DSCWCBLANPIS").
I don't claim to know much about the life of the real Kinsey, so I can't vouch for the truth behind any number of things that occur - but if certain events in the film were, in fact, legitimate, the filmmakers have utterly failed because they can't even make reality believable.On the other hand, if they made this {garbage} up, they have no imagination and a b-movie sense of drama.Jesus, what else can I say about this fetid piece of {garbage}?
Director Bill Condon has done so much better than this, in fact Gods & Monsters still remains a favorite film of mine, but with Kinsey he was working with a larger budget, bigger actors that cannot necessarily act well, and a time constraint that ultimately forces bad decisions in the editing room.
Who knows, I just felt a bit overburden with the issue when I think it could have been said that Kinsey explored all issues, gay or straight, he tried to open the door to this already taboo subject of sex.Overall, I just didn't like it.Grade: * out of *****.
Then they want the government to find out and regulate what consenting adults do in their bedrooms and what books we take out of our public libraries.What does all this have to do with Bill Condon's film, "Kinsey?" Well, we may be in the 21st century, but this nation's attitudes about sexual issues apparently haven't changed much since Dr. Alfred Kinsey began his work.
It's just that we know more about sex now and one of the biggest reasons for that is because of Kinsey's work.Condon's film, which he also wrote, captures the essence of the man exceedingly well, thanks to a commanding performance by Irishman Liam Neeson.
She wasn't annoying enough to ruin the film for us, and it's good to know that, nearly 60 years years later, this film is continuing Kinsey's dream of waking up the general public to the realities of human sexuality.Definitely a maximum star movie on every level..
This is a movie about a man who tries to combat this often touchy subject the only way he knows how: through strict, hard science & biology."Kinsey", then, tells the story of Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson), a researcher who in the 1940s conducts the largest study of human sexuality up until that point.
Battles with wife Clara (Laura Linney) and partners Wardell Pomeroy (Chris O'Donnell) & Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) certainly portray a man who's quest may have turned into a unhealthy obsession.In terms of themes, "Kinsey" is a fascinating film about a very interesting subject.
The products of his labours, known as the Kinsey Reports ("Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953)) were immediate popular sensations, arousing admiration and condemnation in equal volume.An ensemble cast (including Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, and Tim Curry) do very well with what they're given, and it's a fascinating story being told, but the screenplay itself is all over the place.
Directed by Bill Condon ("Gods & Monsters"), "Kinsey" is one of the year's most interesting biographical pictures for its honesty and dignity that it brings to the subject of human sexuality.
The director shows how Kinsey painstakingly teaches his research team how to get their hundreds of interview subjects to open up and speak freely about their sexual histories and as a result, revolutionized the way we think about sex.
They play out their first sexual experience with honesty and conviction, though truthfully, both are way too long in the tooth to be credible as college students early in the story.Peter Sarsgaard gives a subtle, often incisive portrayal of Clyde Martin, the bisexual researcher who successfully seduces both Kinsey and his wife but ultimately falters when he marries and finds his wife cheating on him.
He meets and marries Laura Linney's character, and come across a particular problem sexually, which leads to Kinsey to start researching into the truthful, un-biased facts about people and sex.
Note the wonderful small Shavian scene when Linney challenges Neeson on whether there truly might be social benefits to traditional limits on sexual behavior, limits they both break in the course of this drama of ideas, and with the same "other man." (Peter Sarsgaard, perfect as the right-hand research assistant/Boy Friday/marital aid).
I was amazed at how ignorant people were less than 100 yrs ago when it comes to human sexuality.Inspired by the VD epidemic of the time, Kinsey brought forth much needed information to the public.The film was very well done.
Let's skip sex." Publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) may have shortened Kinsey's life with its bold disclosures to a still Puritanical society.
And PETER SARSGAARD is wonderful as the bisexual who shares a torrid kissing scene with Neeson.Summing up: Uneven film has many moments of truth leading up to publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male"--and later, an equally well read study of the female--which became huge best-sellers and delivered a lot of folks from a life of ignorance about a topic dearest to their hearts..
So he sets out on a scientific review of sexual activity, polling thousands to inform his study.I am not too proud to admit that I had never heard of Kinsey or his (in)famous research and so this film was an interesting summary of his work and his impact to me.
But the film is also very much about a man and the people around him, and societies reluctance to truly explore different points of understanding from what we feel is true.Kinsey the movie starts with an exploration of Kinsey's (Liam Nelson) obsessive scientific exploration of the gull wasps.
Playing Kinsey's wife, Clara McMillen, is Laura Linney who also puts in a good supporting performance as a woman both troubled and intrigued by her husband's research and its effect on him.The rest of the supporting actors also pull off strong performances, especially Peter Sarsgaard as Clyde Martin, a man struggling with his own sexuality and emotions as he works alongside Dr. Kinsey.
Now, having seen it, KINSEY provides an interesting look at a man who devoted his life's work to probing the depths of human sexuality.
I thought Liam Neeson was excellent, as was the entire cast (Peter Sarsgaard, Chris O'Donnell, John Lithgow, Oliver Platt, Timothy Hutton) which also includes an Oscar nomination for Laura Linney as Kinsey's freethinking wife.The movie is provocative and intelligent, scientific not sexy and will make you laugh but also squirm at times and wonder how Alfred Kinsey ever managed to get his book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" published at a time (1948) when sex was generally misunderstood and very taboo.
An enthusiast of biology and always fascinated by the human body and mind when it came to sexual organs and forms of pleasure, Kinsey devoted his life to researching the concept of sex and informing a public that didn't want to openly talk about it.Liam Neeson embodies the role of such a prodigy and Laura Linney plays Clara (nicknamed "Mac" by her husband) as a couple that was on the quest for answers and embracing sharp criticism.
The film is based on the the biography of Alfred Kinsey, the father of modern sexual research and revolution.
As someone on the autistic spectrum interested in how it motivates study and interest in topics, after reading speculations that Kinsey might have been on the spectrum, I wanted to check this movie out.I was not disappointed: it's a fine portrayal of a great scientist's life work; Neeson and Linney act the role of the couple and the ups and downs of their lifes' relationship and sharing in the research in an extremely empathy-raising way.
I find it's the human story of Kinsey and Mac that's the movie's strong point because the film making as other reviewers before said, is fairly pedestrian.A well watched DVD in my collection and a good film for anyone interested in science and the nature of research.
This movie, in its biographical aspect, tells us in astonishingly good way the work of Alfred Kinsey and his struggle to reach the aimed goal of a purely scientific nature, of revealing what actually happens in the human sexual activity and behavior disregarding of moral patterns and also of the common wrong knowledge about it.