Sunday Movie Review: A Dangerous Method

Hi everyone!

I went to see David Cronenberg's critically acclaimed film "A Dangerous Method" this afternoon. It stars the acting triumvirate of Michael Fassbender as Karl Jung; Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud; and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a troubled young Russian woman who starts off as Jung's patient, becomes his lover, and then goes on to a successful career as a psycho-therapist.

Over the course of its 99 minutes, we see beautiful cinematography of the Swiss countryside and period-perfect costumes while listening to a lot of psychoanalytic babble, Freudian angst about sex, juxtaposed with not-infrequent scenes of Ms. Knightley falling out of her bodice while Mr. Fassbender "spanks" her with a belt.

I wanted to like this film. Michael Fassbender is currently one of my very favorite actors and, based on his visceral performance as a hopeless sex addict in Steve McQueen's masterpiece "Shame," one of the best youngish actors gracing our silver screens today. He was good as Jung, just as Mr. Mortensen was good as Freud, and just as Ms, Knightley was merely decent as the sexually repressed Sabina, though her Russian Jewish accent soon got on my nerves as she sounded like she was speaking with a mouthful of marbles.

There was nothing inherently wrong with any of the performances. The problem I had was that the whole production was just a bit stodgy and emotionally detached. It often felt more like I was watching a well-filmed stage play than an actual film, or a costume drama you might see on PBS or the BBC, though not nearly as good as, say, "Downton Abbey."

Another problem I had was that I got the feeling that the script was targeted more towards an audience with a pretty good knowledge of the birth of psychoanalysis and, specifically, the relationship between Jung and Freud. Toward the end of the film, Freud criticizes Jung for giving too much credence to "Shamanism" and "religiosity," neither of which we see any indication of in the film itself. What was more fundamentally problematic for me though was that I didn't believe Mr. Fassbender's Jung had any real great passion for Ms. Knightley's Sabina. For all their chit-chat about sex and violence and Sabina's fantasies about incest, when the spanking begins there's no spark, no chemistry at all between the two of them. It's all just rather bland and fairly clinical. The only real glimmer of any sort of life on screen is when Sabina slashes Jung's face with an envelope opener after he tells her the first time that they need to break things off. Oh, and there's the opening sequence when Ms. Knightley is being dragged into the sanitarium while writhing and screaming like a banshee.

I'm not necessarily saying "A Dangerous Method" is a bad film. Like I said, the performances are by-and-large quite solid and the production values are visually appealing. French actor Vincent Cassel is a standout in his brief appearance as one of Jung's patients, but he disappears all too soon. The script, while not being terrible, is serviceable but too academic to hold much interest. A ninety-nine minute running time does not make for a long film but I was ready for it to be over at around the eighty minute mark.

If you're a Michael Fassbender fan or want to see what all the hype about him is all about, I strongly suggest you check out his performance in "Shame." His performance, paired with the increasingly surprising Carey Mulligan, is truly one of the highlights of the year.

Ciao.