Heavy-footed biopic on the controversial American sexologist Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson, suppressing his Irish accent into something not quite American and not quite British, but adrift somewhere in the ocean between). Writer-director Bill Condon apparently felt it was vital to establish his subject's upbringing under a puritanical father ("Electricity has made possible the degrading picture show"), yet it's unapparent why he needed four actors -- three younger incarnations who are poor matches for the mature adult -- to establish it: the father (a typecast John Lithgow) doesn't change his tune with any of them. The storyline eventually catches up to the lead actors, or vice versa, in middle age, but not before Neeson and Laura Linney have had to play at being virgins on their wedding night: it would be hard to sort out the strands of embarrassment in that scene. There's an efficient framing device -- right at the outset and at intervals throughout -- of Kinsey submitting to the same sexual-history interview he administered to thousands of others, but even with that, it takes a long time to get him from the study of gall wasps to the study of human sexuality. (The lesson learned from the insects -- the individuality of every creature in the species -- carries over to humans as well, with striking rhetorical effect, particularly in a checkerboard montage of talking heads dotting the U.S. map.) A great deal of chronological ground is gone over, in mostly cursory fashion, and without many signposts as to where exactly we are and what's going on in the world at large. It's clear enough, all the same, that we're in a sexual Dark Age and that Kinsey, notwithstanding his unprepossessing bow tie and crew cut, is our Prometheus. His experimentation on himself ("I punctured my foreskin.... It didn't give me any pleasure"), including a go at homosexuality with one of his assistants (Peter Sarsgaard, dropping his drawers for art), takes him near to mad-scientist territory; and even Kinsey squirms a bit in his interview of a sexual omnivore to whom age presents no barrier. Might he be, after all, more a Pandora than a Prometheus? But the balance of the evidence, most tellingly a momentary crack in the façade of the flinty father and a final testimonial from Lynn Redgrave (a holdover from Condon's Gods and Monsters), amounts to a clarion endorsement. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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