In David Cronenberg’s latest film, Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen play Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Ed Harris costars as a one-eyed Victorian miscreant who threatens to besmirch their reputations by revealing their violent criminal pasts.
You wish. What I wouldn’t have given, as I watched this mercilessly dry chronicle of psychoanalysis’ birth, for somebody’s head to explode or for one of the characters to turn into a fly. I would’ve settled for an evil twin. A knife fight with male frontal nudity might have proved tricky to work in but definitely would have livened things up.
Unfortunately the director’s trademark touches are nowhere on display in A Dangerous Method, a movie so snoozy it makes your typical Merchant/Ivory costume drama look like Fast Five. Which is something of a bummer for fans of the Canadian horror maestro coming off A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), two of the finest films of his career. Those pictures ushered in a new period of maturity in Cronenberg’s work. This one heralds something more suggestive of senility.
It’s hard to imagine what he could have been thinking when he decided to make a movie based on Christopher Hampton’s 2003 play The Talking Cure. Nothing screams big screen excitement like a super-gabby theater piece which explores the relationship between two giants of psychology by having them read long letters from one another and discuss each other’s dreams for an hour and a half (“Now this log…perhaps you should entertain the possibility that it represents the penis.”)
The closest the film comes to horror is an early scene in which an hysterical young Russian woman named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) arrives by carriage at the Burgholzli Hospital in Zurich for treatment by Jung. Howling, cackling, bugging her eyes and flailing her arms, she’s the picture of insanity. Knightley juts her jaw so far forward she reminded me of the creature in Alien. Some reviewers have accused her of overacting. Others haven’t seen the movie yet.
Anyhoo, a few chats with Jung and she’s not only calm and composed but well on her way to becoming a psychoanalyst herself. This guy is good. Employing Freud’s revolutionary approach, he questions her about her childhood and discovers that she experienced sexual arousal when her father disciplined her. The good doctor soon succumbs to her advances and begins a kinky affair. Apparently, he wanted to test his theory about a revolutionary Spanking Cure.
You know your movie’s set in Dullsville when multiple scenes featuring Fassbender spanking and whipping an appreciative Knightley do nothing to enliven the proceedings. That’s how inert the interplay between the main characters is. As Freud, Mortensen seems almost comically out of his element. Sporting a beard, a cigar surgically attached to his hand, he blathers pedantically about the future of the field he founded and initially welcomes Jung into his fold believing that a wealthy Protestant would make a valuable emissary for a movement facing anti-Semitism in Vienna.
The blossoming bromance is threatened, however, when Jung questions his mentor’s insistence that sexual repression underlies all mental illness. I’m not kidding. That’s as dramatic as the story gets. I kept telling myself to be patient, that something Cronenbergian would happen any second, that the nonstop ho-hum dialogue was just a set up for a masterful twist. But no such luck.
Dandy costumes. Gorgeous camerawork. Anyone claiming that this dialogue-heavy dud has anything more going for it should have their head examined.
Definitely a Cronenberg signature, which could have been driven home by actresses such as Shannyn Sossamon, or Juliette Binoche.
Good review and I agree that this was a strangely dry movie considering the plot and who was making it BUT….I disagree that this doesn’t fit into Cronenberg’s work. In fact I’d say this is THE prime example of Cronenberg’s work in that he mutates Jung and Freud both literally and figurtively in his work, especially early stuff.
Still, the film didn’t do much for me and I thought it was boring as well.
Ordinarily, I appreciate Knightley’s performances, but felt she really overacted in “A Dangerous Method.” In some areas, her contortions coupled with the phony accent were so over the top that I laughed out loud. Even the sex scenes came off as funny. Since I don’t think that the film was meant to be a comedy, obviously something went wrong.
What I would like to know, is if Jung was as much of a wimp in “real life,” as the film leads you to believe. I sure hope not…