The Guardian

Nobody is fooled by Laura Linney’s goody-goody smile. As ‘Kinsey’ proves, she’s really a bad girl deep down.

Such a nice girl, that Laura Linney, such a good girl. Or so you think. And why would we ever think otherwise, given her cascading Goldilocks, the unnervingly perfect symmetry of her face, bisected by a bright wide smile that forces upwards and outwards those apple-shiny Anne Of Green Gables cheekbones?

This is the face Norman Rockwell might have pasted onto one of his idealised mid-century mothers. And the voice matches almost too perfectly, with its sing-song New England plumminess. Just to look at her one might imagine a career spent playing schoolmarms in westerns, sexless widows, and the star’s best friend. But there’s more to Linney than the stereotypes that come to mind. The face is a great weapon because the smart casting agent can go with its dynamics or work equally successfully against them.

She first came to our attention in ‘Tales Of The City’, perfectly cast as Mary Ann Singleton, Armistead Maupin’s prairie virgin, cut loose in his mythic early-1970s San Francisco of bathhouses, bong hits and Beach Blanket Babylon. As the gays and the not-so-straights swirled around her in a cloud of pot smoke, it was a pleasure to watch Little Miss Midwest open up like a vibrant pale rose. Terence Davies saw exactly what he was looking for and cast her as the treacherous Bertha Dorset in his masterpiece ‘The House Of Mirth’. Here she really was evil, with a million plots hatching behind that “who, me?” smile as she engineered the downfall of Gillian Anderson’s Lily Bart.

She was a blue-collar Lady Macbeth in Mystic River (“You’re a king!” she coos at psycho husband Sean Penn, taking pure murder and sweeping it under Catholic south Boston’s moral rug). And she was about the only person in the otherwise emetic Love, Actually who carried any conviction, as a woman whose life is held back by the need to care for her mentally ill brother. ‘Kinsey’, takes goodie-goodie Laura and just burns her down. As the wife of the eponymous sex researcher, she goes from thickly-hymened virgin to enthusiastic bedroom research assistant, the couple becoming something like the Pierre and Marie Curie of anal sex. When she professes a fondness for said practice, every eyebrow in the audience rises about a foot! It’s 50 per cent Linney’s movie, and why she was pipped at the Oscar post by Cate Blanchett’s colour-by-numbers imitation of Hee-Haw Hepburn is beyond me. No matter, Linney is just getting into her stride. Many pleasures lie ahead, don’t doubt it.