In this world, most of us come into it to fill space, breathe oxygen, obey the rules imposed on us, and try to make something out of nothing without ever questioning what's on the other side of the walls that surround us.
Every so often an eccentric comes along and starts out just as blind and deaf and dumb as the rest of us. However he has a certain spark, a certain sense of purpose, an unformed restlessness which makes him not just stumble across the surface of these walls, but climb over it, see the other side, and realize that there is a world of information and experience out there just waiting to happen. Of course, this has the nasty habit of occurring at a time when such questionings come with the syndrome of skepticism not unlike the kind Noah faced when building his Ark.
Alfred Kinsey is one of these people. Coming into a society which believed that masturbation was not only a sin but could cause blindness or hairy palms, or that homosexuality was a perversity and an act against nature, he discovered through a massive, exhaustive investigation where he interviewed people from all walks of life, that men and woman were much more complicated than initially thought (although such a concept was around for years. Nevertheless it took an investigation with scientific characteristics to validate it.). Masturbation was (and still is) a very popular practice. Approximately 37 per cent of men have had at least one homosexual experience and of those, a third would choose exclusive homosexuality, a third would remain in the middle, and another third would move onto heterosexuality -- he rated all this on a scale from 0 to 6. Premarital sex is common. Women come into marriage knowing nothing about sex. The missionary position was not the only position of choice.
What made Kinsey's investigations so cutting edge was the fact that he dared to bring all these findings into light where anyone else would have simply "not thought about such things" for fear of losing their reputation. On top of that, it's no secret that controversy in itself is a concept we created to pin onto a subject deemed too risky: Kinsey's findings were no different than Galileo's deduction that the Earth was round. But thanks to his studies, homosexuality has taken giant steps to being considered less offensive and just another orientation even though many countries and some American states still have a lot of intolerance on the matter.
A movie like KINSEY does good in showing both the good and the bad sides of the man because only a person who had this intensity of vision could produce such results at the risk of almost losing not only his immediate family (he comes close to on at least one occasion), but friends and associates. No intent is made to glorify or romanticize its main character and the film itself at times seems like an extended course on sex education courtesy of PBS (especially in a sequence involving a frigid woman played by Kathleen Chalfant), but there are moments of comic relief and dramatic moments interspersed that break the extreme intellectual nature of the movie. One of them involves a scene in which Kinsey and one of his male associates, played by Peter Sarsgaard, discover their attraction to each other, which leads to Peter Sarsgaard also disclosing his attraction to Kinsey's wife and colleague Clara, wonderfully played by Laura Linney. Clara's move from being the supporting wife who is disturbed in finding her husband is having a sexual tryst with a male colleague, to being quite open to having her own tryst with this same man, is revelatory as well as the funniest point of the entire film. More enigmatic, though, is Kinsey's reaction to having his wife also experiment sexually but then the film is more interested in focusing on the story from an impartial view than reverting to the predictable recriminations. After all, coming from Kinsey, they would have been out of character anyway and Liam Neeson is effective in not conveying too much, but just enough. Telling, though, is his compassionate expression when confronting his father (John Lithgow, proving he's one of America's finest actors) in an interview that reveals so much about his extreme conservatism and denounces the tradition of parental abuse.
And as an ending note, it has to say something that after everyone has left, funding has stopped, Clara and Alfred remain married to the end of their lives, looking back at their own body of work and hoping that they've done the best. Time, the constant healer and ultimate holder of the Truth, has had its say: sex education has become a part of our own development, and as Kinsey's last interviewee (Lynn Redgrave) -- a closet lesbian who finally came out to a female she pined for -- "After I read your book I realized how many other women were in the same situation. (...) I mustered the courage to talk to my friend and she told me, to my surprise, that the feelings were mutual. You saved my life."
Every so often an eccentric comes along and starts out just as blind and deaf and dumb as the rest of us. However he has a certain spark, a certain sense of purpose, an unformed restlessness which makes him not just stumble across the surface of these walls, but climb over it, see the other side, and realize that there is a world of information and experience out there just waiting to happen. Of course, this has the nasty habit of occurring at a time when such questionings come with the syndrome of skepticism not unlike the kind Noah faced when building his Ark.
Alfred Kinsey is one of these people. Coming into a society which believed that masturbation was not only a sin but could cause blindness or hairy palms, or that homosexuality was a perversity and an act against nature, he discovered through a massive, exhaustive investigation where he interviewed people from all walks of life, that men and woman were much more complicated than initially thought (although such a concept was around for years. Nevertheless it took an investigation with scientific characteristics to validate it.). Masturbation was (and still is) a very popular practice. Approximately 37 per cent of men have had at least one homosexual experience and of those, a third would choose exclusive homosexuality, a third would remain in the middle, and another third would move onto heterosexuality -- he rated all this on a scale from 0 to 6. Premarital sex is common. Women come into marriage knowing nothing about sex. The missionary position was not the only position of choice.
What made Kinsey's investigations so cutting edge was the fact that he dared to bring all these findings into light where anyone else would have simply "not thought about such things" for fear of losing their reputation. On top of that, it's no secret that controversy in itself is a concept we created to pin onto a subject deemed too risky: Kinsey's findings were no different than Galileo's deduction that the Earth was round. But thanks to his studies, homosexuality has taken giant steps to being considered less offensive and just another orientation even though many countries and some American states still have a lot of intolerance on the matter.
A movie like KINSEY does good in showing both the good and the bad sides of the man because only a person who had this intensity of vision could produce such results at the risk of almost losing not only his immediate family (he comes close to on at least one occasion), but friends and associates. No intent is made to glorify or romanticize its main character and the film itself at times seems like an extended course on sex education courtesy of PBS (especially in a sequence involving a frigid woman played by Kathleen Chalfant), but there are moments of comic relief and dramatic moments interspersed that break the extreme intellectual nature of the movie. One of them involves a scene in which Kinsey and one of his male associates, played by Peter Sarsgaard, discover their attraction to each other, which leads to Peter Sarsgaard also disclosing his attraction to Kinsey's wife and colleague Clara, wonderfully played by Laura Linney. Clara's move from being the supporting wife who is disturbed in finding her husband is having a sexual tryst with a male colleague, to being quite open to having her own tryst with this same man, is revelatory as well as the funniest point of the entire film. More enigmatic, though, is Kinsey's reaction to having his wife also experiment sexually but then the film is more interested in focusing on the story from an impartial view than reverting to the predictable recriminations. After all, coming from Kinsey, they would have been out of character anyway and Liam Neeson is effective in not conveying too much, but just enough. Telling, though, is his compassionate expression when confronting his father (John Lithgow, proving he's one of America's finest actors) in an interview that reveals so much about his extreme conservatism and denounces the tradition of parental abuse.
And as an ending note, it has to say something that after everyone has left, funding has stopped, Clara and Alfred remain married to the end of their lives, looking back at their own body of work and hoping that they've done the best. Time, the constant healer and ultimate holder of the Truth, has had its say: sex education has become a part of our own development, and as Kinsey's last interviewee (Lynn Redgrave) -- a closet lesbian who finally came out to a female she pined for -- "After I read your book I realized how many other women were in the same situation. (...) I mustered the courage to talk to my friend and she told me, to my surprise, that the feelings were mutual. You saved my life."