In the forty-two years that David Cronenberg has been making movies he has slowly and surely gone more and more “legit.” Or has he? Cronenberg started out a a director of horror films like The Brood, Videodrome, and The Fly, but in recent years he’s stripped a lot of the supernatural elements of his earlier films while retaining the disturbing elements at the core of them. His last few movies like Crash, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises have lacked the supernatural elements of his early films but they have a horror movie’s audacity when it came to matters of violence and sex. More importantly, Cronenberg has continued to explore the uncomfortable ideas of those early horror movies, namely the role of sexuality in human behavior and the question of whether or not we’re controlled by our sexual urges. That’s a concept that goes all the way back to Freud, who is one of the subjects of his latest (and most seemingly “legit”) film A Dangerous Method.
The film focuses on Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), who is a rising star in the young field of psychology pre-World War I. Early in the film Jung takes a highly disturbed and fidgeting woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) as a patient. Jung eventually determines that her problems are rooted in abuse she received from her father as a child mixed with sadomasochistic impulses that gave her a confused reaction to this abuse. This breakthrough brings him to the attention of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) who he begins to correspond with on a regular basis. Having been diagnosed and treated Spielrein begins to study psychology herself. The rest of the film is about the complicated relationship between these three people; the different philosophies and beliefs that Jung and Freud possess, the unique way that Spielrein admires Freud, and of course the twisted little affair that sprouts between Spielrein and Jung.
A Dangerous Method is based on a play called “The Talking Cure” by Christopher Hampton and adapted for the screen by Hampton himself. It actually focuses much more closely to the facts of Jung, Freud, and Spielrein’s life much more closely than I expected it too, but this does not feel like a biopic or a costume drama at all. I think a big part of what make the film work is that it is interested in these people’s work and their personal lives in equal measure rather than focusing on one or the other as most “biopics” do. Hearing Freud and Jung discuss their field is fascinating, but all the more fascinating because of the various tense issues that influence the way they interact. The film does not shy away from the societal differences that separated Freud and Jung, specifically the film makes a point of showing that Frued’s Judaism had a major effect on the separation of the two given the historical setting.
All three of the film’s characters are played expertly by actors who are at the top of their game right now. Michael Fassbender is of course one of the hottest commodities in Hollywood right now and in a sense he’s playing against type here. He’s playing an older and more intellectual character than he did in films like Shame or X-Men: First Class and he really blends into his role as Carl Jung. Viggo Mortensen is a lot more recognizable in his role, but I liked how he managed to play Frued without falling back on the caricature of the man that is so present throughout pop culture. Mortensen turns Freud into a character in a film rather than a real person who must be impersonated for purposes of impressing Oscar voters. Knightley is especially noteworthy in the film, firstly because she is tackling a more complicated accent (Russian Jewish) and because her character is to some extent mentally disturbed through much of the film. Knightley is quietly becoming a very impressive character actress after years of awkwardly trying to become a movie star, and this might be her best work to date.
A Dangerous Method never feels stage-bound at all it is a movie that primarily plays out in the dialogue between the three characters. It is not a visually stunning film but it also doesn’t yearn to be one. There are some bold moments in the film that will separate the film from more conventional costume dramas of the Masterpiece Theater variety, though I must say it is closer to a straight historical account than I might have expected from Cronenberg. I sort of expected the movie to make a sharp audacious left turn at some point and it never really did, but I was fascinated by what the film did deliver. Perhaps I should just be happy that Cronenberg was consistently able to keep the material from ever being dry and consistently kept my interest despite some occasionally esoteric topics to deal with.
***1/2 out of Four
Glad to here this is good, it finally came out at my theater.