In 1940s America, ex-zoologist Dr Alfred Kinsey transformed the art of love into the science of sexuality with hundreds of thousands of sex questionnaires, leading to his quasi-scientific assertion that heterodox sexual activity – pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex and homosexuality – was far more prevalent than buttoned-up officialdom would ever admit. For this, he has been demonised by the right for allegedly exaggerating the existence of gay sexuality, and by the liberal left for being a patriarch perv and ridiculous Gradgrind, reducing the essence of love to joyless and questionable statistics.
Bill Condon’s watchable and well-acted biopic, Kinsey, rescues him from both ends of posterity’s condescension. And it provides a salutary reminder that, in postwar American society, there was something puritan and repressive in everyone’s willed ignorance about sex. Liam Neeson has a massive, bull-necked authority in the role of Kinsey, the severe pedagogue who brings a Swedish candour to the subject, but looks very Anglo-Saxon with his crewcut and faintly Churchillian bowtie.
This is Neeson’s best performance to date: a fiercely committed, charismatic teacher who is obsessively candid about sex, but reticent and sensitive on the subject of love. He abandons his work on the gall wasp when he realises that bedroom difficulties with his new bride Clara (Laura Linney) can be solved with a simple medical procedure, thus obviating a lifetime’s unhappiness. (Condon’s movie incidentally claims Kinsey had a very large penis; the strict medical problem apparently resided, however, with his wife.) It is a Damascene conversion to sexual frankness.
What made Kinsey tick? The obvious answer lies in his relationship with his father, a boorish lay preacher played by John Lithgow, and the movie suggests that Kinsey partly inherited his father’s churchy gene, substituting his own self-invented sex sect.
It would be easy to laugh at Kinsey as a neurotic careerist displacing his own urges into work in fine Freudian style. But there is something peculiarly sexual in Kinsey’s accretion of facts and figures: a foreplay of research, a tumescence of data, climaxing in the explosive publication, in 1948, of Kinsey’s book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Kinsey becomes a celebrity and his already massive workload multiplies. As Mrs Kinsey famously says: “I hardly see my husband since he took up sex.”
But things get complicated. Kinsey explores his own homosexuality with a researcher; there are adulteries and rows on his staff, who begin producing dubiously valuable masturbation films that look like avant-garde porn flicks.
Condon takes a sympathetic line, though, in this absorbing cine-biography, which promotes the view that, however muddled he was, Kinsey was brave to try using scientific methods to explain sex in an age of unreason. Kinsey, the prototypical sex guru, battled with bigotry and hypocrisy and exhausted himself in the process. This film persuades us that we owe him a great deal.