My comments on 'Kinsey'

Hi all -- just wanted to post my comments on this film and hoping to get feedback. I give the movie a 3/10. I couldn't post my entire comment due to the ridiculous 1,000 word limit on comments, so here I am going to post my entire "review" such as it is.

This extremely disappointing 2nd film from director Bill Condon brings together a very talented cast of actors and technicians for a film that adds up to a waste of time for all concerned. This is one of those films where the problem is not that time and energy weren’t spent on the film – it is wonderfully photographed and reasonably well acted. Ultimate blame falls on writer/director Condon’s shoulders for the disconnected and unfocused nature of his narrative, in which dramatic events seem to occur with no dramatic consequences and every major plot point or character is left either unresolved or resolved by a clichéd and unsatisfactory story device.

The story looks at events spread over the course of Kinsey’s entire life, and ties these events in to the sexual revolution as a whole. There is an interesting device in the early parts of the film whereby Kinsey’s early sexual encounters are detailed through having one of his students give him the famous “sex survey”. However around the middle of the film the narrative catches up to the survey and after this point the device is dropped and the film loses most of its focus. The major events that we see in the early part include Kinsey’s research on wasp migrations, his romance with a graduate student, Clara (Laura Linney) which ends in marriage, and his homosexual relationship with Clyde (Peter Sarsgaard). This is really the point where, for me, the film lost it. The scene with the gay sex wasn’t what bothered me…. That wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the earlier scene involving Kinsey and his wife’s first sex experience. It was the way that his wife seemed revolted and disturbed by the event, only to casually drop her anger when the suggestion is made that Clyde would like to sleep with her as well. I didn’t find this convincing at all in light of how her character was portrayed.

In fact I constantly felt like Condon had an agenda, that he was trying to make Kinsey into some kind of “hero”. Not only that, but that he was trying to use Kinsey as a kind of example of “sexual liberation”. For one thing, the way that he showed the naivete of 1940s/50s America was, I feel certain, very much exaggerated. Kinsey is supposed to come across as some kind of impartial champion of sexual knowledge. We’re supposed to believe he’s impartial because of all the set-up involving the wasp research – even though even in Condon’s presumably sanitized version of Kinsey’s life (I personally don’t know much about his real story at this point), he appears to be anything but objective and scientific. For instance his method of determining the sexuality of the “average” male is to hang out in gay bars and interview gay people. “You have to go where they are” he says or something to that effect. But even a layperson like myself knows that you will not get a representative sample of the adult male population if that is how you approach it. An even more extreme example would be the way he insisted that his father take the survey – and he interviewed his father himself! We’re supposed to believe that Kinsey is unaware of the Pauli Principle? The fact that the person doing observation needs to be as impartial as possible as well as have as little effect on the subject of observation as possible? A “survey” done by a son to his father is the furthest thing from science – yet if my take is correct Condon expects us to admire Kinsey’s desire to personalize his science rather than questioning the validity of these types of surveys.

A lot of things are built up dramatically speaking and then left unresolved – the father/son conflict, the wife’s desire for monogamy (myseriously abandoned), Kinsey’s affair with Clyde and the fact that Clyde’s character is so fully developed and then pretty much disappears from the film, the shadowy figures representing J. Edgar Hoover’s pressure on Kinsey to connect homosexuality to communism (perhaps Condon’s most blatant political statement in the film….. “Kinsey as freedom fighter”) who never appear to have any purpose or consequence, Kinsey’s children who appear and are given dialog and then disappear without a trace, etc. etc. etc. There are also a lot of characters who are extremely one dimensional – particularly Thurman Rice (Tim Curry), who seems to only exist in the world of this film to provide a charicature of a “backwards” conservative. Curry’s performance and the way he was used in the film has no more depth or feeling of reality than a nazi villain in a John Wayne movie.

The film’s conclusion ruins any last semblance of subtexts and depth in this film. First we are treated to Kinsey involved in some kind of bizarre self-mutilation which we have no context to understand…. Then we see him arguing with a potential patron. Perhaps these scenes are included to make us feel sorry for Kinsey, that he was rejected for being too radical. Then he decides to go to Marin county and hang out in the woods with his wife…. This gives us a truly groan-inducing scene where Kinsey and his wife stare at deer and pretend they’re in a Disney movie for a couple minutes. Then we have an even worse scene, where a lesbian woman tells Kinsey: “you saved my life”. Gosh, that Kinsey guy was really incredible after all, wasn’t he? I’ve rarely seen a pair of scenes so contrived and so obviously manufactured to draw a story to a conclusion where no real conclusion exists – the thread of the narrative has long ago been abandoned.

One last comment – the failure of this film is all the more saddening in light of the nature of Condon’s wonderful “Gods and Monsters” – a “bio-pic” that eschews the kind of all-encompassing survey of a “great” man’s life and all his accomplishments crammed into a formulaic redemption story and instead focuses on a tiny portion of James Whale’s life and gives us a kind of vision of the whole meaning of his life through just one week’s events. “Kinsey” is almost the total opposite – it tries to tell way too much and tries very hard to make the audience feel a certain way about its main character despite the fact that the writer/director couldn’t even sanitize or organize his subject’s life enough to avoid making the man look like a neurotic weirdo. I almost hate to say it, but the last conclusion I had on seeing this film was while I still hope Bill Condon has a long and successful directorial career, I am not looking forward to any more of his screenwriting efforts.


Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'