“A Dangerous Method,” director David Cronenberg’s film (“The Fly,” “The Brood,” “Videodrome,” “Eastern Promises,” “A History of Violence”), a film about the relationship and rivalry between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, [with the distraction of Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein thrown in to hopefully spice up the proceedings] is a big let-down from “Eastern Promises,” “A History of Violence” (Cronenberg’s most recent films) or, looking further back, to the films that first attracted our attention to the 68-year-old director: “Dead Ringers,” “The Brood,” or that exquisite depiction of a man blowing his top, “Scanners”(1981).
Those of us who have been following the Canadian director since the days when he had nicknames like “The King of Venereal Horror” or “The Baron of Blood” have little to celebrate in “A Dangerous Method.” Some of us, however, were willing and, in fact, eager to watch Cronenberg go more mainstream with the two films that showcased Viggo Mortensen in 2005 (“A History of Violence”) and 2007 (“Eastern Promises”).
Those Viggo Mortensen vehicles were action-packed, interesting, dynamic, riveting, and Mortensen was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor as Nikolai in “Eastern Promises.” The nude shower scene has indelibly burned itself into memory as some of Viggo Mortensen’s most intense work. To follow up with this Cronenberg role as the talky Dr. Sigmund Freud is a bit of a let-down for fans of the actor and the director. We realize that a Cronenberg film no longer has to mean buckets of blood and weirdness, but does it have to talk us to death?
That is one of the chief problems with this film: it talks when it should show. Admittedly, the subject matter (the well-known rivalry between Sigmund Freud and his disciple Carl Jung) is not all that “action-packed,” but, by shoe-horning in Jung’s romance with a demented Russian Jew who likes to be spanked (Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein), the hope may have been to spice up the relatively static slow-moving plot and pique the audience’s interest.
My interest was piqued, but only because I kept expecting the C.G (computer graphics) wizards to spring into action and for Keira Knightley, portraying a mad patient, to turn into a werewolf. I remember those films where the werewolf jawbone elongates and the creature starts baying at the moon. The way Ms. Knightley chose to portray mental illness, she may have a great career ahead as a werewolf. I felt embarrassed for Miss Knightley, who is capable of good work and usually looks quite beautiful, if anorexic. In this film, she wears beautiful costumes and the scenery is wonderful, but the leading lady never comes off as seductive, beautiful or convincing. One scene, in particular, where the costumer (Denise Cronenberg) chose to put her in a period bustier, was titillating for all the wrong reason.
The film opens with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) being forcibly transported by carriage to Burgholzli Clinic in 1904, where Dr. Carl Jung will attempt to use “the talking cure” (psychoanalysis) put forth by Dr. Sigmund Freud to cure her. I’ve seen Keira Knightley in various roles. I was impressed with her recent work in “Never Let Me Go.”
I was not impressed with Knightley’s interpretation of a mental patient in the throes of delirium. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small town with a Mental Institute (second largest in the state of Iowa) and we Catholic School children were routinely and frequently bussed to the edge of town to perform for the patients at Christmas or other holidays. In other words, I’ve seen more than a few mental patients. While they sometimes (not always) do have unmistakably eccentric and strange manifestations of their illness, Keira Knightley has added a totally new dimension to the strange, vacant stares and the odd Tourette’s-like articulations that the patients I personally observed sometimes displayed. And I don’t mean this in a good way. Rather than embodying the tics of a believable mentally ill person, “The Dangerous Method” just made me appreciate the subtler interpretations of psychosis of classic films like “Suddenly, Last Summer” and/or Jessica Lange’s superb performance as “Frances” in 1982’s “Frances.”
After the introduction of Sabina Spielrein into the personal and professional interplay between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender of “Inglourious Basterds” and/or “X-Men: First Class,” where he played Magneto) and Dr. Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), we have lots of letters back and forth between the two great men and lots of reading of the letters. (One is inexplicably addressed: “Dear Dr. Young.”)
Along with the writing and reading of letters, there are philosophical discussions galore (Viggo always chomping on a cigar and wearing a full beard) and very few memorable scenes that ring true. One, in particular, that shows Sabina Spielrein scribbling furiously while an audience listens to a playing of Wagner’s Das Reingold was static in the extreme. At no point did Keira Knightley seem like a good bet to become a therapist or Jung’s mistress, but both occur in the course of the story.
A minor character in the film is Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), another Freudian disciple, who seemed to represent the human embodiment of that little red devil in “Animal House” who perches on Tom Hulce’s shoulder at one point urging him to “F*** her.” Cassel comes and goes quickly and the most interesting thing about his libidinous remarks he makes and the course of action he recommends in life is that, at film’s end, we learn that he died, broke, in an alley in Berlin in 1919. (So much for unfettered hedonism and where it may lead.)
For me, one of the key lines in the script is this: “Sometimes you have to do something unforgiveable just to go on living.” In Jung’s case, that seems to have been to take former patients as his lover(s), beginning with Sabina and ending with Toni Wolff. The shot of Jung and Spielrein, prone, floating in a sailboat with red sails that Jung’s wife has given him as a gift is quite beautiful and if there had been more of those shots and fewer shots of Keira Knightley doing anything (especially sticking her jaw out in a most unattractive manner that did not reflect the reality of a mental patient’s “tics”), the movie would still have been talky, but it might have had a fighting chance. Despite the overwhelming odds of this topic being able to be translated to the screen in anything other than a “talky” script based on the book “A Most Dangerous Method” by John Kerr, less would have been more, where Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) was concerned.
Here’s hoping that Cronenberg and company have more “Eastern Promises” and “A History of Violence” films in store for us and fewer snoozers like this.