"Kinsey" (2004) - Movie Classics

Is sex a plain and simple methodology to prove our existence that is procreation? This question would be idiotic to ask in a much sustained and prevalent educative environment the world has become, subtracting the area in which the morality is a way to live. That does not mean city life is a melting pot for free love. Rather the collective group of humans has been given up. But it is not about group of people. As Alfred Kinsey in real life looked at the uniqueness of each gall wasps of the million he collected, the humans in their isolation and privacy dictate that form of biological act defining them. And more often than the regularity of the hearings and stories, it ends in a guilt and then a useless nature of how dirty something has happened. Welcome to the world of morality and sexual validity.

Alfred Kinsey an entomologist in the late forties and early fifties shocked the American culture by the explicitness in his book about the male specimen in their sexual performance, habits, perspective and what not. Writer/Director Bill Condon in “Kinsey” chronicles this man’s life, in an unusual form. He does not depict the times and let the costumes and customs define and tell us about it. The reason being the validity of that taboo in the current culture between the humans. In a strong and stringent childhood of Christian discipline, Kinsey (Liam Neeson) is hardly to be jailed by his father (John Lithgow). Love for the nature and the science of it makes the field of study an obvious choice for Kinsey.

The film begins with Kinsey guiding his research associates on how to conduct an interview. An interview of the sexual history with a total stranger. I recently discovered how much closed and concealed I was in mentioning about the women I talk to with my friend and I was thinking how did Kinsey manage to put people at ease to blurt out the most intimate and possibly the most unexpected shocking details without judgment, impartiality and unbelievably clinical. See, for him the species in the form of flesh and blood amuse him. It invites curiosity and the empathy for the billions and billions of people in this world unknowing about their behaviour. The behaviour understood in the closed corners as being nothing but feeling guilt and deviant about themselves. Kinsey wants to help all of them, through his statistically exhaustive study of sexual history.

What a courageous, industrious, open, knowledgeable and passionate man he was. Before venturing out to any one else, he goes through the experiments himself. He as a person of the same specimen form needs inspection, tests and observations. Liam Neeson utters the dialogues meaning every word of it. The belief in this man’s perspective towards the inability of the human to embrace the idea of such an act with clear mind is nothing short of an astounding portrait of that figure.

The boundaries defined by the norm of the society are shattered. Once the word is out on the regular observed deviance is learned more as a phenomenon so detailed, distributed and unique, it attracts people. Not that it is accepted with great arms of understanding but a weird sense of questioning the activity behind closed doors a little more objectively. This is the dialogue the man brought in between the people. The branded and defamed acts were merely a form of human pattern of liking and disliking as eating.

But does this enlightenment through the study wakes up the sleeping mind in the taboo of sex? Enlightenment is a threatening word for many. It would then make them to be the surrendered soul of wronged words against the crystalline clarity of the people’s behavioural patterns. We become aware of the rationality existing in that arena and a miniscule amount of fear is withered off for more open discussion. And to do through in a life’s existence and billions of collecting histories in the restrained society of fifties is something more than a great feat. It is an invention.

If so much can be learnt from the man, the art of putting forth such a content with the similar love for the human physicality as Kinsey did in the material is nothing other than integral and honest. We not alone see Kinsey as the passionate scientist but also as a father angered by the inability of his son to be more talkative about penis, vagina, hymen and masturbation as a dinner conversation as his daughters and a man encountering the most disturbing and extreme stories for the society’s trained beings with an invisible sterilized gloves to his unprejudiced mind. While he is awed by the individualities of gall wasps and thus the same with humans, he is frustrated of being labelled wrongly and been taken as some one tilting the ordinance in the society to chaos and uncultured.

And he meets a wife who is not alone passionate as him but a person of immense patience and vigorous enthusiasm to learn anything and everything. That is his wife Clara McMillen (Laura Linney). When Kinsey gets friends with a male student Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsagaard) so fast, the suspicion and look on Clara is obvious to suggest the eventual. Kinsey thrives for perfection in perfecting his life in terms of conducting his project to the utmost purity. The instinct to own the companion member close is an accepted regular human behaviour. The mind processing it in terms of the physical intimacy is beyond fascination. The eagerness to learn the reasoning or solving the puzzle is also fascinating and becomes a chicken and egg thing. Some end as a mad person, some end as being enthralled by the steps of discovery and accept their limitation and some other invent belief system to satisfy the same mind which has allowed them to be free. Kinsey began in the claws of strict conservative father as a man to be forced to abide a belief system he detested and flown out of the nest to be enthralled by the discovery he made in the insects and then into humans and finally drove himself to the edges of madness in obsessing his work. And with Liam Neeson in a great directorial presentation by Bill Condon, “Kinsey” is an educative and an experience very much suggested and recommended, strongly.