Where Darkness Ruled, He Shone a Bright Light. Movie review 'Kinsey'

A. Scott

KINSEY," Bill Condon's smart, stirring life of the renowned mid-century sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, has a lot to say on the subject of sex, which it treats with sobriety, sensitivity and a welcome measure of humor. Mr. Condon, who parsed the riddles of erotic desire in his earlier film "Gods and Monsters," regards the humid matters of the flesh with a dry, sympathetic intelligence. What really turns him on, though - or at any rate what makes his new movie's heart beat faster - is science.The director addresses sexuality with candor and wit, but it is the act of research as much as its object that imparts to "Kinsey" its flush of passion and its rush of romance. I can't think of another movie that has dealt with sex so knowledgeably and, at the same time, made the pursuit of knowledge seem so sexy. There are some explicit images and provocative scenes, but it is your intellect that is most likely to be aroused.Which is, of course, its own form of pleasure, one all too rarely granted by film biographies of the famous and the great. Unlike written lives, which thrive on endless expansion and documentation, biopics must compress and shape the messy narrative of actual life into three acts and two hours, and the conventions of the genre have the effect of eroding the very individuality they mean to celebrate, constructing smooth, nearly interchangeable stories of trauma and triumph out of the knotty particulars of public life and personal history. "Kinsey" does not entirely escape from these conventions, and includes a few scenes in which its protagonist's character is explained rather than embodied.