In 1998, writer-director Bill Condon made an incisive, moving film called Gods and Monsters, an account of the last days of old Hollywood director James Whale, most famous for directing the original Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Gods and Monsters was intimate and focused, less concerned about telling the story of Whale's life than about painting a portrait of a soul in decline.
With Kinsey, Condon goes a more traditional biopic route to tell the story of legendary sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and while the film isn't the triumph Gods and Monsters was, it's still a great success in its genre. Liam Neeson plays Kinsey, a zoologist at Indiana University in the 1940s studying gall wasps, and finding great pleasure, if little acclaim, in his detailed analyses of the tiny insects. But when he marries grad student Clara McMillen (Laura Linney, perfect as always) and has a disastrous wedding night, Kinsey discovers his true calling: studying the sexual habits of humans, something heretofore unheard of.
It's a shocking enterprise for the period, and Kinsey is amazed at how little people really know about sex as he starts interviewing subjects. He recruits eager student Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard) to help at first, and then two more assistants (Chris O'Donnell and Timothy Hutton) as the project gets bigger and bigger. Kinsey, who grew up with a repressive preacher father (John Lithgow, showing uncharacteristic restraint), fully embraces the myriad possibilities of uninhibited sex, exploring a homosexual relationship with Clyde and crossing the line with more than a few of his interview subjects, all as Clara stands by him.
Condon tackles a lot here, covering nearly Kinsey's entire life, from his boyhood oppression at the hands of his father to his twilight years, vilified by a prudish society angry at him for shedding light on unmentionable sexual practices. At times it feels like too much, and Kinsey suffers from the typical biopic problem of playing more like a highlight reel than a story. But Condon throws in enough clever narrative devices to break up the routine, and the central characters, especially Kinsey, are well-drawn.
Although it's obvious that the openly gay Condon sympathizes with Kinsey's crusade against puritanism, he pulls no punches with the man himself, showing his egotism and inability to understand love to anywhere near the degree he understood the minutiae of sex. If Kinsey ultimately bites off more than it can chew and ends up in a predictable place, it still deserves points for ambition, and for taking the audience on an enlightening and enjoyable journey.