By Roxana Hadadi
David Cronenberg’s films are not normally low-key.
1983’s “Videodrome” was about snuff films giving their viewers brain tumors. 1986’s “The Fly” had that disgusting transformation from man to insect. And that nude Russian bath fight in 2007’s “Eastern Promises”? Intense and amazing.
But Cronenberg doesn’t use any kind of no-holds-barred grossness in “A Dangerous Method,” his portrait of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whose friendship at the turn of the 20th century was somewhat severed by Jung’s relationship with former patient Sabrina Spielrein. Spielrein — who many now believe had an affair with Jung — would become a psychoanalyst as well, and she, Freud and Jung differed in their various theories about why we all act the way we do. History has treated Freud and Jung well, of course (who can take any kind of elementary psychology course without hearing the word “repressed?”), but Cronenberg gives Spielrein equal treatment here. She’s just as important as the men, and not just because she comes between them — she dared to challenge them at a time when no other women did.
But unless you truly, really appreciate the kind of nuanced performances Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley give as Jung, Freud and Spielren, respectively, “A Dangerous Method” can be a bit of a snoozefest. Perhaps it’s because Cronenberg adapted the film from the 2002 play “The Talking Cure” by Christopher Hampton, which was in turn based on the 1994 nonfiction book “A Most Dangerous Method” by John Kerr. But either way, it’s so unlike Cronenberg’s other films, which often veer into shocking displays of beautifully choreographed violence, that it’s difficult to understand why he didn’t tweak his source material a bit. In an interview with New York magazine earlier this month, Cronenberg said, “I’ve always been interested in that unique, invented relationship” between psychiatrists and their patients, and yes, he does dig deep into that. Most people who aren’t psychology nerds, however, just aren’t going to care.
The links between the people in “A Dangerous Method” overlap and intersect quite often, but they begin with Jung (Fassbender) and Spielrein (Knightley), a young, beautiful and quite demented Russian woman whose parents send her to his care at a clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1904. Every day, Jung tells her, they will talk for an hour or two, to “see if we can identify what’s troubling you?” — and soon she spills her guts, sharing details about repressed sexual desires that cause her to grotesquely cavort her body and jut her lower jaw out in a terrifying way. Jung is fascinated by the “humiliation” that drives Spielrein, but quickly grasps her intelligence; after they break through the obstacles facing her realization of her sexual interests, he enlists her to start helping him in various psychoanalytic experiments. She’s bright and clever, and they’re drawn together in a way that Jung and his wife Emma (Sarah Gadon) clearly are not.
But ah, his wife. Emma seems demure, beautiful and perfectly willing to pump out children for Jung — every daughter worries her, since she thinks her husband desperately desires a son — and her extreme wealth means Jung has a pleasantly cushy upper-class life. She’s not an idiot, though, and when she begins to pick up on something more developing between Jung and Spielrein, she moves to stop it. Similarly concerned about the relationship between the doctor and his patient is Freud (Mortensen), who considers Jung his protégé and grows increasingly wary of how Spielrein is changing both his research methods and his judgment.
At the center of all this pressure is Jung, who must juggle his wife’s expectations, his lover’s demands and his mentor’s prodding. How they impact his beliefs and understandings of his role within the world of psychoanalysis would change the field, and his research, for years to come.
So yeah, the film is a slow burn. And it’s unfortunate that Mortensen and Vincent Cassel, who portrays another psychoanalyst named Otto Gross (who eventually became an anarchist, and then starved to death in Berlin), don’t have more to do. Cassel, always so intimidating and menacing, gets a few solid lines in — he brags about his many “respectable mistresses,” and advises Jung to “never repress anything” — but he’s in the film for 15 minutes, max. As Freud, Mortensen has more of a role as Jung’s foil, but Cronenberg keeps their conversations often frustratingly polite. All their digs are veiled in letters, and the only time Freud seems genuinely angry is when Jung gets first-class accommodations on a ship to the United States because his wife is so wealthy. It’s not that impactful of a rivalry.
But Knightley outdoes herself here, bucking mightily against our idea of her as just that corset-wearing girl from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. She shrieks, fights, juts out her jaw and seems thoroughly, wonderfully insane, which makes her transformation to articulate, challenging analyst all that more impressive. Her scenes with Fassbender are sympathetic and poignant, and their stark, overwhelmingly depressing conversation about the futility of their love is the film’s most honest moment. True, they do risqué things to each other in bed. But underneath that are genuine emotions that Cronenberg knows how to manipulate.
If only Cronenberg could have built tension or suspense in any way. “A Dangerous Method” works well as a character study, but without an effective exploitation of the stakes, Fassbender’s, Knightley’s and Mortensen’s characters never explode out of the gate. They each display moments of emotional depth and real gravity — just not enough of them.
