Animal magnetism and Kinsey

Upon exiting the film Kinsey there was a horse trotting alongside, appearing almost as if on cue, strolling with a majestic equine gait next to my soulful shuffle. The two of us, that is me on the left and the horse and his two handlers on the right, were parallel to all those new outside poster marquees the Greenway Three just installed in the concrete walkway to the underground Greenway parking lot. I had just departed through the Greenway side exit door and the horse, no doubt a stud on display, was being led out of the Stouffer’s Hotel
The point being that Kinsey is a movie rich in animal magnetism, a film which saves the educational animal sex films (lizards, skunks, kitty cats) for the end credit roll. Making a biopic of the life of Alfred Kinsey, a prominent zoologist who devoted a generation of his life to cataloguing gall wasps (non stinging insects), then turned his ardent scientific mind to itemizing humans and their attitudes toward sex, would seem to be quite a stretch as far as narrative goes. But that’s exactly what writer-director Bill Condon does. Condon, who previously helmed Gods and Monsters, fleshes out dramatic incident from pure emotions and the result is more hit than miss.
As for Kinsey, he claimed to be a 3 on his own sexuality scale of 0 to 6. Zero being an absolutely heterosexual and six being openly gay.
Kinsey (played with stern open mindedness by Liam Neeson) has a liberated marriage with wife Clara (Laura Linney in the kind of solid performance that really just requires looking concerned at the right moments) and a solid relationship with his staff. Kinsey always knows the right thing to say. For instance when Kinsey catches Clara talking privately with her lover, who also happens to be Kinsey’s chief assistant and sometimes-male lover Clyde (Peter Sarsgaard), he reminds them of being on time for an appointment. Kinsey had his priorities in line, business first, then plenty of sex. Kinsey it turns out feels resentment at his old man, John Lithgow dredging up the puritanical paternal stuff he patented in Footloose, who raised him in a repressed manner. Before Kinsey returns to nature he confronts Lithgow if for nothing else than to up the melodrama quotient of Kinsey.
By contrast, there’s less hanky panky and practically no drug use in Kinsey versus the biopic of Ray Charles, Ray.