Kinsey | |
---|---|
Theatrical release poster
|
|
Directed by | Bill Condon |
Produced by | Gail Mutrux |
Written by | Bill Condon |
Starring | |
Music by | Carter Burwell |
Cinematography | Frederick Elmes |
Edited by | Virginia Katz |
Production
company |
|
Distributed by | Fox Searchlight Pictures |
Release date
|
|
Running time
|
118 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $11 million |
Box office | $16.9 million |
Kinsey is a 2004 American biographical drama film written and directed by Bill Condon. It describes the life of Alfred Charles Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson), a pioneer in the area of sexology. His 1948 publication, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (the first of the Kinsey Reports) was one of the first recorded works that tried to scientifically address and investigate sexual behavior in humans. The film also stars Laura Linney (in a performance nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress), Chris O'Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, and Oliver Platt.
Professor Alfred Kinsey is being interviewed about his sexual history. Interspersed with the interview, are flashbacks from his childhood and young-adulthood. The young child years show his father, a lay minister, denouncing modern inventions as leading to sexual sin, then in early adolescence, humiliating him in a store by denouncing its keeper for showing him cigarettes, while his adolescence shows his experiences as a Boy Scout and a late teenage scene shows Kinsey disappointing his father by his chosen vocational intentions. It then shows adult Kinsey teaching at Indiana University as a professor of biology lecturing on gall wasps.
Kinsey falls in love with a student in his class, whom he calls Mac, and marries her. Consummation of their marriage is difficult at first, because of a medical problem Mac has that is fixed easily with minor surgery, after which it is shown that she has an equally intense sexual appetite as her husband. Meanwhile, at the University, Professor Kinsey, who is affectionately called "Prok" by his graduate students, meets with students after hours to offer individual sexual advice.