"Kinsey": behavior behind closed doors.

Saturday evening after grocery shopping and literature search for work, I scrolled through U-Verse and found "Kinsey". It starred Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, and I recognized the name Alfred Kinsey from a psychology study I'd read for a psychology class. Press play.

Alfred Kinsey, an entomologist by nature who studied gall wasps, realized the need for a widespread study on sexual behavior while lecturing a marriage course at Indiana University. Realizing the lack of public knowledge and conversation about sex and sexuality, he began collecting information on people's sexual history through verbal questionnaires. He eventually published the results of his questionnaires on around 18,000 people in the Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, known collectively as the Kinsey Reports.

The movie portrays struggles in Kinsey's professional and personal life. He struggled with his own sexuality including his (and his wife's) relationship with his assistant Clyde Martin portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard. The movie is informative and moving but never overwhelming. The different conflicts Kinsey deals with fade in and out (even the climax of the movie when his health is failing and Rockefeller Foundation withdraws their funding), but the movie is a overall satisfying portrayal of a great man who triumphs against social "propriety" to bring a much needed conversation out from closed doors.

It is rated R, and the subject matter may be touchy for some people. I highly recommend it- you may learn more from this movie than you did from your high school Health class, for example, that people's sexuality fit more onto a spectrum than a dichotomy (Kinsey scale).