I finally got around to watching Kinsey, and it’s a pretty good movie. It frequently feels like it was directed by several different people, but it’s never bad, and it’s often inspired.
And it’s also a chance to see Laura Linney give another brilliant performance. Her role as Clara McMillen Kinsey seems underwritten, but Linney invests it with so much intelligence and wit and warmth that it’s rescued from the kind of supportive wife hell that might have resulted with a lesser actor.
I have no idea why Linney isn’t a huge star. If there was any justice in the world, she would have won an Academy Award for You Can Count on Me, but she didn’t. (At least she was nominated.) Mystic River was terrible (another example of Clint Eastwood stomping all over an entertaining novel), and it’s a testament to Linney’s abilities that she was nominated for an Oscar for a role that one could kindly call inconsistent.
Now she seems to be in some kind of supporting actor limbo, where she can get a juicy role in a small film like The Squid and the Whale or try and elevate something that will probably awful, like the upcoming Nanny Diaries, where she gets to play a horrible, rich-bitch mother. Her stage career, which runs concurrently with her film work, is probably a lot more rewarding, and New Yorkers seem to greet her performances with the kind of delight and reverence they no doubt deserve. But I don’t live in or near New York, so I’m stuck filtering through her movie career.
She really needs to do an intelligent, low-budget comedy that suits her skills. She seems like one of the smartest actresses currently working, and I’d particularly like to see her co-star with Lauren Graham, another marvelous actress whose film career has been much more dire than her talent seems to merit.
Back to Kinsey, though. It’s nice to watch Peter Sarsgaard‘s career evolve. He and Linney seem to have a lot of the same resources as performers — intelligence, an ability to commit to a character, and a sly sense of humor. He was really great in Shattered Glass, and he’s almost as good as Linney in Kinsey. The upcoming Mysteries of Pittsburgh should be interesting; he seems like a natural fit for a Michael Chabon character, like he could fall into the tone of Chabon’s works with no difficulty at all.
As for the rest of the cast, well, Liam Neeson is weirdly mesmerizing, though not as arresting as Linney or Sarsgaard. (Their characters seem like they’re laughing behind Kinsey’s back during their wonderful scenes together.) John Lithgow, Oliver Platt and Tim Curry are like a Honeybaked trifecta, chewing whatever piece of scenery is closest to mouth. And Chris O’Donnell always feels like he should have “as Himself” included every time his name appears in credits. It’s weird how he can be inoffensive and bland but still prove to be a jarring presence at the same time.