Cronenberg Plays it Safe in a Dangerous Method

A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

Directed by David Cronenberg

Recorded Picture Company, 99 mins. R (nudity, sadomasochism)

* * ½

David Cronenberg’s latest directorial project takes us inside the personal lives of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and Jung’s patient-turned-psychiatrist, Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). My feeling about this film can be summed up by a concept from psychology: ambivalence.

The film opens with the bourgeois Jung entrenched in a private sanitarium. The neophyte psychiatrist is about to try Freud’s controversial talk therapy on a particularly difficult subject: Spielrein, a spitfire of madness who contorts her body into shapes that strain her physique, and rockets between moments of razor-sharp lucidity and impulsive wildness. We might as well get this out of the way: Knightley’s not just the weak link in the cast; she’s more like a broken one. To put it even more directly, she’s dreadful–one of the worst performances I’ve seen since Kevin Costner as Robin Hood. She’s supposed to have animal magnetism, but she looks anorexic; her acting is so single-note histrionic that we simply don’t believe in her when she’s supposed to be “cured” and on the path to revamping psychoanalysis in her native Russia. She had an affair with Carl Jung in real life, but it’s hard to fathom their relationship on the screen.

The interesting dynamic is the one between Freud and Jung, Freud being the Father figure that Jung must slay in order to develop his own myth- and symbol-based analytical methods and break from his mentor’s mono-causal link between neurosis and sexuality. Mortensen is as good as Knightley is bad; he plays Freud as a man ferociously protective of his intellectual turf, silently devastated by what he perceives as Jung’s betrayal, and yet a surprisingly loyal and caring friend. It’s also a delicious irony to see the man who wrote about sex all the time as the most conventionally moral character in the film.

As for Jung, Fassbender portrays him as a bourgeois hypocrite–happy to live in the lap of luxury courtesy of the money of his wife Emma (Sarah Gadon), whilst being unfaithful to her. He is outwardly the picture of Swiss Calvinism, but his first conquest is Spielrein, who gets her jollies by being dominated and whipped. Soon, we no longer know which is bigger, Jung’s impact on the field of psychoanalysis or his ego.

In the film, you’ll vote for ego. The script is adapted from a stage play, which was adapted from John Kerr’s scholarly treatise of Jung. Think a copy of a copy. At 99 minutes, you’re not going to learn much about the intellectual disputes between Freud and Jung; these come in hints and dribbles, but never depth. Vincent Cassel makes an appearance as Otto Gross, a drug-addled psychiatrist driven by an unfettered id. He’s mainly here, though, to act as the devil on Jung’s shoulder that encourages him to act upon passion and impulse. Cassel has a certain rakish charm, but the ideas he puts forth is all surface and no depth. In sum, this is a non-intellectual film about intellectuals. It’s as if Cronenberg either did not trust filmgoers to unravel the world of ideas, or that he felt them incapable of doing so.

Perhaps he’s right, but it makes for rather tepid filmmaking from a man who directed such edgy films as Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), and A History of Violence (2005). I suspect Cronenberg hoped that the sadomasochism theme would supply the danger implied in the film’s title, but Knightley can’t deliver on that promise and, in the end, only Jung’s bourgeois comfort seems the least bit imperiled. The film’s luscious exteriors simply can’t compensate for detachment that feels as cool as an Alpine lake any time Mortensen isn’t on screen. This speaks volumes. You know that a film lacks spark when you’re waiting for Sigmund Freud to appear and pick up the pace!