azurre

心血來潮, 順便想練習英文, 看了沒字幕的Kinsey, 發現沒字幕真是一大挑戰,
更何況那又不是好萊嗚式的電影, 看沒多久就放棄, 但還是去找了影評和劇情慨要,
留起來以後再看吧~~~

"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.

There is, for example, a dinner table scene midway through
in which Kinsey (Liam Neeson) is clearly treating his son
with the same imperious lack of sympathy that his own
father (John Lithgow) inflicted on him. We get the point,
but just in case we missed it, Mrs. Kinsey (Laura Linney)
steps in to berate her husband. "Have you learned nothing?"
she demands. "Nothing?"

In spite of a few heavy-handed moments like that one,
"Kinsey" is remarkably adept in showing us just how much
Kinsey did learn, and how much we can and did learn from
him. Depending on your view of current mores, he was either
a Promethean figure, liberating Americans from ignorance,
superstition and hypocrisy, or a Pandora opening up a box
of permissiveness and perversion. Mr. Condon clearly takes
the first view, and he argues the case for Kinsey's
contribution to sexual knowledge and social health without
ignoring the more troubling aspects of his life and legacy.


But his Kinsey - whose hobbies include gardening and
classical music, and who is rarely without his trademark
bow tie - is also, charmingly, a nerd. "You're a lot more
square than I thought you'd be," says one of his research
subjects, and the future Mrs. Kinsey finds him a little
"churchy." Kinsey, a zoologist specializing in the taxonomy
of gall wasps, came late to sex, as both an intellectual
and a physical pursuit. As the movie tells it, his
fieldwork, collecting hundreds of thousands of wasp
specimens, offered an escape from a sickly, unhappy
childhood and from his bullying, puritanical father, a
professor at the Stevens Institute in Rochester and a
Methodist lay preacher first shown inveighing against such
sinful modern inventions as the combustion engine, the
electric light and the zipper. "Lust has a thousand
avenues," he rails.

His son, an inveterate quantifier, would later conclude
that this estimate was much too low, and he set out, with
impressive empirical zeal, to explore every avenue he
could. Kinsey's method was both simple and elaborate: he
would interview as many people as he could, gathering their
"sex histories" and tabulating these into a multi-volume
work intended to provide basic, comprehensive information
about sexual behavior.

In the movie's account, he arrived at this project more or
less by accident. His marriage, to Clara McMillen (known as
Mac), begins with some sexual awkwardness that is cured by
practical information, and before long Professor Kinsey
(nicknamed Prok) is dispensing advice to perplexed
undergraduates at Indiana University. Their official
instruction in matters of eros comes in a hygiene course
taught by a priggish professor played with nearly indecent
relish by Tim Curry. The misinformation that was
perpetrated in the name of science is perhaps the most
shocking thing in the movie, and the fact that we are
shocked by it is a measure of how radical and sweeping
Kinsey's work was.

That work and its consequences, both public and intimate,
are at the heart of "Kinsey," and Mr. Condon's great
achievement is to turn Kinsey's complicated and
controversial career into a grand intellectual drama.
Almost in passing, the film illuminates the intricacies of
postwar academic and philanthropic politics, as Kinsey must
assuage a nervous university president (Oliver Platt) and
make nice with a skittish program officer from the
Rockefeller Foundation (Dylan Baker). Mr. Condon also
examines the curious dynamics of Kinsey's inner circle of
research assistants (Timothy Hutton, Chris O'Donnell and
Peter Sarsgaard), whose own marriages became part of
Kinsey's research.

As did Kinsey's own. The greatest risk the movie takes is
in attempting to deal frankly with its hero's own sex life
without succumbing to prurience or easy moralism. Sometimes
his scientific zeal shaded into obsession, and his methods
went from the empirical to the experimental in ways that
remain ethically troubling. "Is there a Mrs. Kinsey?"
wondered a scandalized matron in a famous magazine cartoon
published in the wake of the best-selling "Sexual Behavior
in the Human Male." "Kinsey," in supplying an answer,
presses deeper into the mysteries of marital loyalty than
its main character was able to go.

Mac - loyal helpmeet, fellow scientist, willing participant
in carefully planned, scientifically motivated acts of
adultery - seems like an impossible character to play, but
Ms. Linney meets the challenge with forthrightness,
delicacy and a brisk sense of mischief. She and Mr.
Sarsgaard, whose ability to underact becomes more thrilling
with each new role, bring Mr. Neeson's faultless
performance into high relief. Their characters, less
monomaniacal and more adaptable than Kinsey, love him in
spite of his lapses and limitations, and through them the
audience does, too.

And "Kinsey" is, evidently, a labor of love - not
uncritical or hagiographic, and certainly not blind to the
real Kinsey's misjudgments and failings, but nonetheless
marked by fond and grateful admiration. This is expressed
most directly late in the film, when an interview subject
(Lynn Redgrave) offers a spontaneous testimonial to her
interlocutor, thanking him for saving her life. The moment
unfolds without hyperbole or melodrama because the rest of
the film has anticipated it.

Speaking to a roomful of students (including Mac, before
she was Mrs. Kinsey) about his beloved gall wasps, Prok
celebrates the creatures' extraordinary diversity. "Only
variations are real," he says, an insight that informed his
later research and that gives "Kinsey" its deepest moral.

In undertaking his sex research, Kinsey set out to document
what was normal, and discovered a universe of variation. In
publishing his findings, he horrified some readers and
titillated others, but the implications of his work, as
presented in this humane and serious film, go far beyond
mammalian physiology or human behavior. Each of us is
different, and none of us is alone.

"Kinsey," which both discusses and depicts a wide variety
of sexual acts, is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying
parent or adult guardian). Scientifically, of course.

'Kinsey'

Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.


Written and directed by Bill Condon; director of
photography, Frederick Elmes; edited by Virginia Katz;
music by Carter Burwell; production designer, Richard
Sherman; produced by Gail Mutrux; released by Fox
Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 118 minutes. This film
is rated R.

WITH: Liam Neeson (Alfred C. Kinsey), Laura Linney (Clara
McMillen), 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) and Lynn Redgrave (final interview subject).

Correction: December 1, 2004, Wednesday:

A film review in
Weekend on Nov. 12 about "Kinsey," a biography of the sex
researcher Alfred C. Kinsey, misstated the location of the
Stevens Institute of Technology, where his father was a
professor. It is in Hoboken, N.J., not in Rochester, N.Y.