It's all about sex, stupid
By Robert Lachman

In 1948 Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson), a Harvard-educated zoologist and teacher at Indiana University, wrote the first and only in-depth study of American sexual behavior "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." It was a huge best-seller and opened the door to the truth behind sexuality that had for so long been hidden by puritanical forces in the government and the pulpit. It also caused problems in Kinsey's own life once he published its companion piece, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female." He also created the famous Kinsey scale that rates sexual orientation: 0 being exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual with all matter of bi-sexuality in between. The film "Kinsey" is a tribute to the man who single-handedly brought sexuality kicking and screaming into the 20 th Century. It is also a humorous and detailed study into Kinsey's life and how he pioneered the first in-depth study of sexuality in humans.
The film begins with Kinsey's formative years. The son of a domineering Methodist who decries anything that has to do remotely with sex, Kinsey found freedom in the great outdoors, studying animals and insects. As a zoologist specializing in the study of gall wasps, Kinsey is hired to teach biology at Indiana University where he marries a freethinking female student, Clara McMillen (Laura Linney, "Mystic River," "Love Actually"). "Human beings are just bigger, more complicated gall wasps," he says. In the course of his teaching he finds himself confronted by a newly married student couple with sexual problems. She thinks she's frigid and her husband is afraid to pleasure her orally because he read somewhere that it will make her sterile. As Kinsey discovers other students with similar problems he realizes no one has ever done the proper clinical research to answer their questions properly, so he decides to be the first to explore sex from a scientific point of view. He recruits a team of researchers from the student body and they invent an interviewing technique which helps people deal with the shame and guilt they've been taught to feel when they discuss sex. The original study is more than a hit, it's an explosion, which the press compares with the dropping of the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, his follow-up study on women, written later during the Cold War, is seen as an attack on motherhood and family values, causing Kinsey to be ostracized by those who championed the first study. At the same time, his researchers begin to question his idea that sex for humans should be no different than it is for animals. No guilt, no shame, just sex. The film tells us that Kinsey not only pioneered the study of sex, but used his young researchers and their mates as sexual guinea pigs to help the studies along. There is one unsettling scene where Kinsey interviews a man who has spent ten years compiling his own survey of sexual proclivities. The man claimed to have slept with 8,412 people, members of his own family, animals and 636 pre-adolescents, yet Kinsey, preparing his third book on sex offenders, takes it all in stride, fascinated by how far people will go for sexual gratification. Peter Sarsgaard ("Shattered Glass") plays Clyde Martin, Kinsey's chief researcher and occasional lover. He gets upset when he realizes that more trouble comes from wife-swapping than Kinsey has ever suggested. Neeson is excellent as the researcher who did so much to awaken the collective libido of America to the potential of sexual experience, yet couldn't come to grips with his own sexual impulses. Whether, as Kinsey, he's charming his students and the faculty or defending his idea that sex can be had free of any emotional entanglements, Neeson walks a fine line between bemused indifference to what forces he has set into motion and total dedication to its ends. Laura Linney ("Love Actually," " Mystic River ") is a delight as his wife Clara who stands by him through everything, even when she finds out he has had a homosexual affair with Clyde Martin. The rest of the cast is equally good, with John Lithgow solid as Kinsey's pious father and Timothy Hutton and Chris O'Donnell fine as the two other researchers, Paul Gebhard and Wardell Pomeroy. Writer/Director Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters") has fashioned a strong and thoughtful film with "Kinsey." He keeps the action moving with visual techniques such as Kinsey's famous sex interviews and montages to help tell the story and gets quality performances from all his actors. Richard Sherman's production design captures the look of the 1940s and '50s through clothing, old television shows, magazine covers and automobiles, while cinematographer Frederick Elmes ("Coffee and Cigarettes," "Hulk") does a brilliant job of bringing both Kinsey's childhood and the collegiate atmosphere of Indiana University, where Kinsey compiled his survey, to life. In the end, after he has fought ill health, lost his grant money and is in real trouble, he muses on his apparent inability to deal with the connections between sex and love. "It's impossible to measure love," he says. "When it comes to love we're all in the dark." "Kinsey" is a powerful film that explores something that we are bombarded with every day, but still seem to be ignorant of ... sex. It shines the bright light of truth on the varieties of human sexual behavior that many of us are still afraid to acknowledge.