A DANGEROUS METHOD ★★★
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Viggo Mortensen
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Rating: 14A (sexual content, adult themes, not suitable for children)
Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, AMC, SilverCity
The cinema of David Cronenberg is consumed by the transformation of bodies and the psychology that follows from that, a genre that resulted in a lot of oozing and bodily fluids in the earlier, wetter films, and much brooding in his later, more mature ones. A Dangerous Method seems like a departure — it’s about the ideas of psychoanalysis as developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung — but around the time that Keira Knightley twists her face into paroxysms of orgasmic pain as she’s being spanked with a belt by Michael Fassbender, we realize that a) the human mind can never be divorced from the body that houses it, and b) Keira Knightley can contort her chin into an alarming forward thrust.
Indeed, Knightley dives so wholeheartedly into hysteria that one has no option but to suppose it must be on purpose. She plays the real-life Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian woman who, in the late 1890s, was transported to the Swiss clinic of Dr. Jung (Fassbender) to see if his new “talking cure” could save her. Sabina screams, laughs, twists her arms and hands into frozen claws, and yawns hugely with the pain of memory: She appears to be suffering from some form of muscular paralysis and a serious case of theatrical overkill.
This isn’t just method acting. It’s dangerous method acting.
It doesn’t take long for Dr. Jung to discover that she has spent her childhood being physically abused by her father, and that she enjoyed it. “I looked for any humiliation,” she recalls, an instant psychotherapeutic breakthrough that you suspect would have taken years under stricter Freudian analysis. “I’m vile, filthy and corrupt.”
Such self-laceration is the beginning of a cure, apparently, although Sabina will never lose her taste for the lash. She becomes the masochistic lover of Dr. Jung, an otherwise calm and measured man whose brand of psychoanalysis also depends on a belief of mysticism: “Catalytic exteriorization phenomenon,” he calls it, when the crack of dry wood occurs just a few minutes after he thought it might. He’s married to a wealthy woman (Sarah Gadon), who does not satisfy his unexpectedly perverse urges. Having a mistress to spank is just the thing.
This adventure in sexual liberty is a metaphor of sorts — the libido meeting the id, perhaps — that occurs under the far-off tutelage of a superego in the person of Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Freud is a father figure to Jung, just as Mortensen is something of a muse to Cronenberg (this is their third film together), and the therapists analyse one another’s dreams with a quick facility. Actually, given the ready-made symbols (that log could be a penis), Freud’s interpretations are almost comically obvious.
The men are at odds, however, in their approaches: Freud is the strict pragmatist, Jung, the quasi-spiritualist. “We’re on our way, bringing them the plague,” Freud says as he and Jung sail into New York City harbour on a visit to the U.S. Unfortunately, they’ve sailed out again by the next scene: A Dangerous Method doesn’t do much with its historical opportunities.
Freud’s disapproval of Jung’s affair seems pretty mild for a man whose field is the complex intricacies of the human soul. The screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on his play The Talking Cure, portrays a subtle conflict — Freud is jealous of the fact that Jung married a rich woman — that will eventually result in differing approaches to psychiatry. It’s a talky film, but the characters are so rich that even the rhetorical shortcuts are compelling: The human mind is also endlessly fascinating.
The result is a dreamy but somewhat stilted historical document whose sexual obsessions come with the sense of remove that sometimes characterizes Cronenberg’s films. Spielrein, who went on to become an eminent psychiatrist herself, seems pathologically needy, but never very sexual, and Jung’s turmoil comes across as morose opportunism. Mortensen provides some acerbic spark, but the real treat is a small role by Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross, a psychotherapist who believes that indulging all his desires is the road to mental health: He’s an educated rake. “Freud’s obsession with sex has a great deal to do with the fact that he never gets any,” Gross says. Possibly, it’s as simple as that.
