A Dangerous Method
Sunshine Landmark, December 30, 2011
Movie #84 for 2011
A movie about Frued and Jung?! Awesome!! They’re two genuinely deep and interesting thinkers who, after working closely on pioneering the practice of psychoanalysis, had an irreparable ideological rift. This should be great! But, hang on, why is Keira Knightly --? Oh, it’s a movie about Freud, Jung and “the woman that captivated them both”? Well that’s… less awesome. Way, way less awesome.
MICHAEL FASSBENDER (from everything ever in 2011) is great as the particular and deeply intelligent Jung; VIGGO MORTENSEN (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence, pictured with Fassbender) is fun as the ego-maniacal and sex-fixated Freud (and seriously, these two have the best voices in movies at the moment); but KNIGHTLY, as Sabina Spielrein, is as uneven as her Russian accent (although has a compelling physicality).
I know that CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON (Atonement, and here adapting his own play based on John Kerr’s book) can write, and I know that DAVID CRONENBERG can direct. I just see no evidence of it here.
Cronenberg seems distracted, and sometimes absent. He seems not to have noticed that the actors are all working as if they’re in three different movies - Fassbender playing for naturalistic earnestness, Mortensen for a kind of theatrical caricature and Knightly for all she was damn well worth (which is considerably too much, it seems).
I don’t know if the film tells much of the truth of the stories of Jung and Freud, but so much of it feels like a fabrication. And that, ultimately, is the thing that counts. Add an unnecessary sexed up love triangle, and you’ve got a film that - for me at least - is way less awesome than its potential.
