Any film bringing together two of psychology’s pioneers is surely a dream project. In bringing Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure to the big screen (inspired by John Kerr’s breathtaking book A Most Dangerous Method), Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg signed two of the best actors of their generation to play particularly formidable figures: Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud. The film, the appropriately titled A Dangerous Method, covers the period before World War I in Jung and Freud’s lives as their careers intersected and Jung became to heir apparent to Freud’s psycho-analysis. Only, as we know, that never happened, and the film deals with their initial courtship as well as their eventual falling out.
That alone is enough for a two and a half hour film, but Cronenberg inserts a third major character into the only 99 minute long films: Keira Knightley as Sabine Spielrein, who starts out as one of Jung’s patients – a hysteric - before becoming a psychiatrist in her own right. Spielrein’s story is in itself an entire film and in attempting to give all the film’s plot lines and relationships equal weight, Cronenberg denies himself (and the viewer) the opportunity to develop and engage with a given relationship in detail.
A Dangerous Method is also one of the more un-Cronenbergian films the director has made. Given his proclivity for sex and violence, there is a strange sense of restraint surrounding the film, as if Cronenberg was holding back when his material gave him free reign to present some vivid scenes of both sex and violence. (There is some spanking, but in light of Crash, that’s hardly anything). With one or two exceptions, Cronenberg doesn’t inject the film with any of his usual visual flair, and his depiction of the rise and fall of the Jung-Freud dynamic feels like it’s only skimming the surface (and it is).
That alone is enough for a two and a half hour film, but Cronenberg inserts a third major character into the only 99 minute long films: Keira Knightley as Sabine Spielrein, who starts out as one of Jung’s patients – a hysteric - before becoming a psychiatrist in her own right. Spielrein’s story is in itself an entire film and in attempting to give all the film’s plot lines and relationships equal weight, Cronenberg denies himself (and the viewer) the opportunity to develop and engage with a given relationship in detail.
A Dangerous Method is also one of the more un-Cronenbergian films the director has made. Given his proclivity for sex and violence, there is a strange sense of restraint surrounding the film, as if Cronenberg was holding back when his material gave him free reign to present some vivid scenes of both sex and violence. (There is some spanking, but in light of Crash, that’s hardly anything). With one or two exceptions, Cronenberg doesn’t inject the film with any of his usual visual flair, and his depiction of the rise and fall of the Jung-Freud dynamic feels like it’s only skimming the surface (and it is).
A Dangerous Method is then in one sense strangely visually conservative and at the same time appropriately confined, in that the sense of inertia that characterises much of what happens on screen anticipates a beautifully underplayed, under written ending that delicately introduces one of Jung’s most famous dreams – “Europe is flooded...”- into a film in need of some adventure.
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