"Kinsey"

Condon wants to make the case that the world needed Kinsey's work, and it did, given the extent that, pre-Kinsey, young people often believed, for example, that giving oral sex to a woman would render her sterile. But this Kinsey, particularly as Neeson plays him, is essentially a tweedy cuddlebug with a homosexual bent and some interesting ideas about heterosexual relations. For the worse and not for better, he's Kinsey with no balls.

Even though neither the script nor the direction do him any favors, Neeson is a huge part of the problem: He slouches through the movie wearing an expression of bland benevolence with his scholarly woolens. Neeson can be a sensitive, reflective actor, but he tends to be a recessive one, and here, instead of giving the movie a center, he only seems to amplify its negative space.

In one scene, circa the mid-'50s (Kinsey died of heart failure in 1956), Mac finds him in the bathroom after he's punctured his own foreskin to find out what kind of sensation it would produce. She's shocked, as a sensible person would be, whereas Neeson's Kinsey stares at her with the muted gaze of a wounded lamb. Again, Condon presents the scene with stupefying blankness -- we're supposed to intuit that we're seeing an image of human frailty and encroaching insanity, and while we get the idea, all right, the scene makes us feel nothing, except, perhaps, disbelief tinged with revulsion.

Much of "Kinsey" is intentionally funny -- Condon can't help addressing the anti-masturbation "advice" given in the old Boy Scout Handbook with a self-conscious smirk, as if it needed that -- but the funniest bits are the ones you're not supposed to laugh at. At one point, in voice-over, Neeson reflects on his childhood love of the forest, which led to his career in science. "Biology! The science of life!" he exclaims with the same gusto that Eddie Albert gave the words "Fresh air!" in the theme song to "Green Acres."

A few performers struggle valiantly to give the material some much-needed texture: Linney is wonderful in an early courtship scene where Kinsey presents her with a pair of lace-up clodhoppers as a gift. (She's thrilled with this dumb present, and claps the shoes against her beau's chest with unbridled delight.) Peter Sarsgaard gives his character more ripples of subtlety than the script probably called for, and also pulls off a fearless full-frontal scene. But the most effective part of "Kinsey" may be the end credits, which feature film footage of crazily mating animals, including porcupines. The subtext is that love hurts, and sometimes sex does too. It's the only good stiff poke we get from this dopily lifeless picture.

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