Released 2004
Stars Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker
Directed by Bill Condon

Everybody's sin is nobody's sin. And everybody's crime is no crime at all.

Talk like that made people really mad at Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey. When his first study of human sexual behavior was published in 1947, it was more or less universally agreed that masturbation would make you go blind or insane, that homosexuality was an extremely rare deviation, that most sex was within marriage and most married couples limited themselves to the missionary position.

"Kinsey," a fascinating biography of the Indiana University professor, centers on a Liam Neeson performance that makes one thing clear: Kinsey was an impossible man. He studied human behavior but knew almost nothing about human nature, and was often not aware that he was hurting feelings, offending people, making enemies or behaving strangely. He had tunnel vision, and it led him heedlessly toward his research goals without prudent regard for his image, his family and associates, and even the sources of his funding.

Summary by Roger Ebert

This is a pretty interesting film about a man who helped break down moral codes in America, although his intentions were to study and educate. Educate, he did. One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is how it shows middle American youth lost with their own sexuality. If the church crowd had their way, eventually our society would dissolve because no one would know how to reproduce. The level of misinformation in the early 1900's was appalling. I have to believe there were plenty of people who knew the ins and outs, but most girls were probably pretty much in the dark--even on their wedding nights. It surprises me to no end how a natural and necessary part of human nature could be so morally regulated, and I'm quite thankful Alfred Kinsey broke the barrier to teach us all something we should all inherently know anyway. He blazed the trail to make it socially acceptable to actually discuss the topic and bring it out in the open. Eventually many of the myths about sexual acts causing blindness or sterility were dispelled, and the next generation went a little sex crazy in the 1960's. A repressed society will eventually explode once the repression is lifted, so it should have come as no surprise to anyone.

As a movie, "Kinsey" is pretty entertaining. It's a bit long and a little disturbing at times, but it points an unblinking camera at Alfred Kinsey. People who read his book probably thought of him as a Hugh Hefner type (before there was a Hugh Hefner), but he was more like one of Jerry Lewis' nerdy professors. He thought of human beings as just another animal and didn't seem to fully comprehend the emotions that make us uniquely human. It's a good thing he met his wife, who tried to help him relate to the rest of the humans. Given his didactic nature, it's a little surprising students liked him as much as they did, but that was probably due to his honesty. He lived in a world of facts and didn't understand how facts could hurt someone's feelings, but that honesty must have been refreshing back in his day--especially coming from a teacher, a teacher who willing to give sexual advice to his college students who didn't know what that fuzzy thing was down there. --Bill Alward, June 5, 2005