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| KINSEY 2004 - USA - 118 min. - Feature - Color Director - Bill Condon |
| Genre / Type - Drama, Biography [feature], Period Film Flags - Not For Children, Strong Sexual Content, Nudity, Profanity MPAA Rating - R Keywords - research, sexuality, sex-survey, social-science Themes - Sexual Awakening, Teachers and Students, Love Triangles Tones - Sexual Intimate, Humorous, Understated, Literate, Cerebral Moods - Food for Thought Produced by - Ab'-Strakt Pictures / American Zoetrope / Myriad Pictures / N1 European Film Produktions / Pretty Pictures / Qwerty Films / Searchlight Pictures Release - Nov 12, 2004 (USA - Limited) Released by - 20th Century Fox / Fox Searchlight MPAA Reasons - for pervasive sexual content, including some graphic images DVD Street Date - May 17, 2005 Languages - English Subtitles - English, Spanish Screen Format - Widescreen Sound - DDDDS, DTS Aspect Ratio - 2.35:1 (DVD) Studio - 20th Century Fox Cast Liam Neeson -- Alfred Kinsey Laura Linney -- Clara Kinsey Chris O'Donnell -- Wardell Pomeroy Peter Sarsgaard -- Clyde Martin Timothy Hutton -- Paul Gebhard John Lithgow -- Alfred Seguine Kinsey Tim Curry -- Thurman Rice Oliver Platt -- Herman Wells Dylan Baker -- Alan Gregg Julianne Nicholson -- Alice Martin Bill Sadler -- Kenneth Braun John McMartin -- Huntington Hartford Veronica Cartwright -- Sara Kinsey Kathleen Chalfant -- Barbara Merkle Heather Goldenhersh -- Martha Pomeroy |
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| Plot Synopsis Alfred Kinsey was an entomologist who taught at Indiana University and had a keen interest in an area of human behavior that had seen little scholarly research - human sexuality. While the courtship and reproductive patterns of animals had been carefully documented, Kinsey believed that most "established facts" about human sexual behavior were a matter of conjecture rather than research and that what most people said about their sex lives was not born out by the evidence (a subject that had personal resonance for him given the troubles he and his wife Clara Kinsey had in the early days of their marriage). After introducing a course in "Marriage" at Indiana University which offered frank and factual information on sex to students, Kinsey began an exhaustive series of interviews with a wide variety of people from all walks of life in order to find out the truth about sex practices in America. When he published Sexual Behavior and the Human Male in 1948, his findings were wildly controversial, indicating that most men had a wider variety of sexual experiences than most people imagined, including a number of practices commonly thought to be dangerous or perverted (including pre-marital sex, same-sex contacts, and masturbation). An even greater outcry greeted Kinsey's next volume, Sexual Behavior and the Human Female, which contradicted common notions than most women went into marriage sexually inexperienced. Kinsey is a film biography written and directed by Bill Condon which examines Kinsey's life and work from his strict childhood until his death in 1956. Liam Neeson plays Alfred Kinsey, and Laura Linney co-stars as Kinsey's wife and colleague Clara. John Lithgow highlights the supporting cast as Kinsey's repressed and moralistic father, while Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, and Timothy Hutton play members of Kinsey's research team and Tim Curry appears as an IU faculty member at odds with Kinsey's teachings. - Mark Deming, All Movie Guide Reviews KARL WILLIAMS All Movie Guide On the heels of the critically acclaimed Gods and Monsters (1998), writer/director Bill Condon scores again with another meticulous, intelligent biography of a prominent but little-understood historical figure struggling with his controversial sexuality. In the case of Kinsey, sexuality is at the core of his hero's intellectual and physical journey, giving the filmmaker a chance to pose difficult questions about nature versus nurture, human sexual behavior, and the role of psychology in reproduction. Answers, even theoretical ones, to those questions are not always forthcoming. In one sequence Kinsey mutilates himself in an effort to examine the line between pleasure and pain, but his motivations are never fully explored. In another, his son explodes with frustration at his family's frank dinner-table discussion of coitus, but the character then disappears, as do the uncomfortable but completely justifiable criticisms he raises. While imperfect, however, Condon is to be applauded for mining such a rich, complex, and still-controversial subject, achieving a provocative and absorbing final result. The performances of Liam Neeson, Peter Sarsgaard, and Laura Linney are uniformly excellent and emotionally layered, and the filmmaker introduces a sneaky sense of humor into his material that renders it more accessible than his previous efforts. Kinsey (2004) joins the ranks of A Beautiful Mind (2001) and the TV film Longitude (2000) as a sterling example of the sci-bio subgenre. MICHAEL WILMINGTON Chicago Tribune Movie Critic November 12, 2004 What price is sexual candor? "Kinsey" gives us a few notions. This hip, highly partisan biography of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey is a surprisingly entertaining movie about the perils of studying sexual behavior in a sexually uptight culture--our own. Bill Condon's film, unabashedly pro-Kinsey, is a moving and often very funny look at an unlikely revolutionary, the scholarly Indiana University biologist whose rigorous investigations into the statistics of American sexuality changed our country's sociocultural landscape. It's a fairly inclusive bio-drama: Condon follows Kinsey from boyhood to the brink of death, from an Eagle Scout country upbringing to early academic success (in insectology) to his first trail-blazing classes in human sexuality, to the advent of his celebrated research interviews, to world fame and notoriety as the sexologist whom social conservatives loved to hate. Those researches first brought Kinsey worldwide fame--as a bestselling author, subject of magazine cover profiles and even a mention in Cole Porter's "Too Darn Hot"--but later, venomous opposition, McCarthy-era status as a pariah and a premature death from heart disease in 1956. The movie covers all of this, underscored by the personal drama of the Kinseys' own sexual awakening and that of their student research staff. Condon is at his best in the lighter opening and midsection, rather than the darker denouement. But he's helped immeasurably by his wonderful cast. At the movie's heart are Liam Neeson and Laura Linney in two very impressive performances as Kinsey and his wife. Neeson--with his monumental presence, leonine profile and mischievous eyes--radiates movie gravitas, rebelliousness and quiet courage as the professor who realizes the lack of basic information about sexual behavior. So does Linney as Kinsey's even more sympathetic wife, the brainy and indomitable Clara McMillen Kinsey. These are charismatic, emotionally deep, knowingly humorous performances. In contrast, the Kinseys' dashing young researchers--played by Peter Sarsgaard (as Clyde Martin, who allegedly seduces them both), Chris O'Donnell and Timothy Hutton--supply amusing comic-romantic relief. Neeson and Linney convincingly and sometimes whimsically portray the Kinseys as a loving, learned but against-the-grain couple who emerges from the more outwardly puritanical '20s and '30s to provide a bridge to the more sexually open '60s--most explosively through Kinsey's two landmark works, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" (1948) and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" (1953). This is a serious subject, and one that still prompts livid arguments. But the surprise of Condon's movie is not its seriousness but its humor. The film shows the Kinseys, their friends (including Oliver Platt as their university champion Herman Wells) and enemies (a venomous professor played by Tim Curry and fatuous "philanthropist" Huntington Hartford, played by John McMartin) with unusual perceptiveness and wit. It playfully reveals staff sexual affairs and gets both fun and horror from the sometimes hilarious, sometimes shocking contrast between sober, scientific questioning and unbuttoned answers. Condon, whose Oscar-winning "Gods and Monsters" screenplay sympathetically portrayed gay Hollywood horror movie director James Whale ("Frankenstein"), focuses on Kinsey as a hero not just of science but a beacon for America's sexually marginalized--which is why the casting of the sturdy, statuesque Neeson works so well. For Condon, Kinsey was a classic American rebel, born in a prejudiced and sexually repressed household led by a severely censorious teacher-preacher father (John Lithgow), who surmounted that blinkered background. . The replication of the original Kinsey interviews gives the film its unexpected humor. Those sometimes hilarious, occasionally poignant interviews remind us of the puritan tradition that Kinsey helped undermine as well as the volatile and not always happy sexual progress since. Awards Best Supporting Actress (nom)-Laura Linney -2004 Academy Best Film (win)- -2004 American Film Institute Best Actor (win)-Liam Neeson -2004 L.A. Film Critics Association Best Picture (nom)- -2004 National Board of Review Best Supporting Actress (win)-Laura Linney -2004 National Board of Review Best Supporting Actor (Runner-up) (win)-Peter Sarsgaard -2004 National Society of Film Critics Best Supporting Actress (Runner-up) (win)-Laura Linney -2004-National Society of Film Critics Best Supporting Actress (nom)-Laura Linney -2004-Screen Actors Guild Film Presented- -2004 Telluride Film Festival Film Presented- -2004 Toronto International Film Festival Best Original Screenplay (nom)-Bill Condon -2004 Writers Guild of America In Competition- -2005-Berlin International Film Festival Best Actress (nom)-Laura Linney -2005 London Film Critics Association Best British Actor (nom)-Liam Neeson -2005 London Film Critics Association 2004 Broadcast Film Critics Association Best Picture (nom) Best Screenplay (nom)-Bill Condon Best Supporting Actor (nom)-Peter Sarsgaard Best Supporting Actress (nom)-Laura Linney 2004 Golden Globe Best Actor - Drama (nom)-Liam Neeson Best Picture - Drama (nom) Best Supporting Actress (nom)-Laura Linney 2004 Independent Spirit Award Best Actor (nom)-Liam Neeson Best Picture (nom) Best Screenplay (nom)-Bill Condon Best Supporting Actor (nom)-Peter Sarsgaard |
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