Film Reviews

Kinsey

• Rating:
• Director:
• Starring: Chris O'Donnell
• Details: US/ 120 mins/ (18s).

Although he was cruelly overlooked at this year's Oscars, Liam Neeson is in superlative form at the heart of this biopic of Alfred Kinsey, the man who through his studies and books is often credited with revolutionising American attitudes towards sexuality. Something of an enigma, Kinsey's life is examined from his upbringing at the hands of an overzealous father (a scene stealing John Lithgow) the sort of moral fanatic who equates the invention of the zipper with "moral oblivion". After he became a biology professor at Indiana University, specialising in the reproductive qualities of gall wasps, Kinsey decided that a more interesting subject lay with the mating habits of humans. Thus, Kinsey assembled a team of researchers (including Timothy Hutton, the excellent Peter Sarsgaard and Chris O'Donnell) to ask all sorts of embarrassingly forthright questions of his wife (Laura Linney, sublime) and a host of other volunteers for inclusion in his report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male - the book which would completely alter the way the world looked at doing the bold thing.
As with most biopics, the most basic challenge presented by Kinsey is choosing what to edit out of this perplexing and enigmatic figure's life. While the results may not always lend themselves to a dynamic narrative, director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) deals with his subject in an intelligent, thoughtful and restrained manner, fashioning comedic mischief out of his scientific candour - see an embarrassingly frank discussion with the professor's children over dinner - while his indecision regarding his own sexuality provides an unforeseen edge. Resisting the temptation to moralise, Condon has presented a biopic that has the intelligence to realise that it can't paint a definitive portrait of Kinsey, and never seeks to offer an easy to digest, flattering character sketch of a man whose own overwhelming desire was not anchored in eroticism but in the pursuit of knowledge.

Review by Garreth Murphy