Something for the weekend

REVIEWED - KINSEY: Six years ago, Bill Condon made an auspicious debut as writer-director with Gods and Monsters and collected an Oscar for his elegant screenplay speculating on the last days in the life of James Whale, the openly gay director of Frankenstein and Show Boat, in the 1950s, writes Michael Dwyer

Condon revisits that era for his second feature, Kinsey, shifting his attention towards the pioneering American sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who was born in 1894, five years after Whale, and died of a heart attack in 1956, the year before Whale committed suicide in his Hollywood swimming pool. It is easy to imagine how eagerly Whale would have welcomed Kinsey's ground-breaking sexual research when it was published, and how, as a film-maker, he might have admired Condon's stylish, sophisticated biopic.

Over the course of just two hours, the film adeptly charts Kinsey's life and work within a hostile, rigidly repressive environment. The turn in his life comes in the late 1940s, when Kinsey (Liam Neeson, never more impressive) is an Indiana University lecturer diligently studying the gall wasp - before he applies a comparable fascination to putting people and their sexual practices under the microscope.

Prompted by sexual problems early in his marriage to one of his students, Clara McMillan (Laura Linney), Kinsey realises how little data exists on sexual behaviour and how much ignorance, fear and guilt prevails in an era of "morality disguised as fact".

Kinsey recruits some enthusiastic students as his researchers to conduct the hundreds of face-to-face interviews that form the basis of his controversial 1948 study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, and its even more eye-opening 1953 companion volume on female sexual behaviour. The forces of conservatism respond by shooting the messenger.

The movie does not flinch from noting the naivety of Kinsey's idealism and his propensity for self-absorption and tactlessness. As he encourages his core team of researchers to experiment and sleep around, he jeopardises his own marriage when he willingly succumbs to his coolly bisexual assistant, Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard).

Condon's film makes it clear that Kinsey was no liberal firebrand determined to rock and shock society with his findings. Instead, it portrays him as a tweed-suited, bow-tied and wiry-haired "square", as he was called, a dedicated scientist driven by an innate curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

As a portrait of a scientist, his work and personality, Kinsey is a far superior film to the shallow A Beautiful Mind. It crackles with a refreshing intelligence and narrative dexterity, and the topicality and present-day relevance of its themes are implicit. Deeply involving, consistently entertaining and consummately acted, the film builds to a moving coda.