A Dangerous Method

NOTE: Before we begin the review proper, I viewed this film two years ago when it was in theaters with my best friend. I believed that I had already posted my review for it sometime last year, but it appears to have disappeared off of listal. So, here we go again – I’ll do my best to try and remember all of the pros and cons I had with the film, but do cut me some slack. It has been awhile…

And now on to our regularly scheduled programming!

A Dangerous Method on the outside looks like David Cronenberg has gone not only mainstream, but into glossy Oscar-bait territory with this story of the birth of psychoanalysis, but beneath that surface lies the twisted, diabolical sexuality and violence at play in so many of his great films. Yes, it does away with body-horror, and the story seems to follow routine beats along the projected bell curve of plot diagrams, yet beating at the center is the story of one man’s slow moving mental and emotional destruction by his mentor-colleague and patient-romantic partner. It twists and refracts this story points into surprisingly naked and candid emotional fractures for Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender).

On the immaculately beautiful and, it must be said, wholly intoxicating exterior, this looks like pure prestige picture. The cinematography is luscious, the costumes expertly done, and the locations and interiors look remarkably period accurate to construct and make us believe in this world. And from the outset I was hooked in.

One of the first images we see is that of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) screaming, spitting and gyrating madly in a carriage. We aren’t inside of the carriage, but outside of it looking in through a glass. We removed, viewing in on her and her madness from a safe distance. It isn’t long before we’re subtly shifted from this safe voyeurism into intimate and uncomfortably close proximity with her sexuality and insanity, which sometimes dovetail.

Spielrein begins as Jung’s newest patient/test subject for some of his latest innovations and radical ideology. He consults with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), his colleague and teacher, about Speilrein’s case, who advises that the woman is potentially dangerous and to tread carefully. And he begins his analytical work with her with the appropriate amount of distance and composure. All it takes is one visit from hedonistic Otto Grossman (Vincent Cassel) to begin the fracturing between patient/doctor relationships, Jung’s relationship with Freud, and everything else he holds dear.

It is here, with the appearance of Grossman, that the restrained id of Jung becomes to come raging out full force and we delve from austere prestige film tones into something very much Cronenberg. These characters may play prim and proper on the outside, but all it takes is the gentlest of pushes before their self-destruction and sexual hunger squirm out of the cracks in their exterior selves.

And when you’re blessed with a cast this good, they make any and all of the transitions both immensely riveting and utterly smooth. Knightley in particular is so committed to contorting, twisting and stuttering out her character’s tics and neurosis during the earliest scenes that her transformation is the most startling. As her character’s desire to be disciplined and used for sadomasochistic sex games begins to reintegrate her sanity, it begins to tear apart Jung’s. When she reemerges at the end as an outwardly prim, smart and proper woman of society, and a mental health professional in her own right, it’s the kind of performance and character journey that the Oscars should be rewarding. Sadly, she wasn’t nominated for much of anything.

But at least she can take solace with her costars who both turn in outstanding work. Mortensen’s Freud, whom he plays as a domineering and menacing father-figure, is always quick to put Jung back in his presumed place as an apprentice every time Jung believes that they are to be seen as contemporaries. There are numerous scenes in which in a controlled, quiet way Mortensen reveals Freud to be a man who must be viewed as the king of the mountain and any challengers to his throne as mere pretenders. His emotional abuse to Jung is particularly wrenching towards the end of the film as Jung sits around nearly catatonic and broken.

And Fassbender, who had a banner year in 2011 and should’ve enjoyed a career-first Oscar nomination both for his work in Shame and for appearing in every other movie seemingly, anchors the film with his intensity and mercurial charm. His Jung is a man slowly devastated by competing interests and needs. Aching to get out from Freud’s shadow and his forced patriarchal domination, and questioning whether he should or shouldn’t engage his libidinous desire for Spielrein, and guilt-tripped by society for cheating on his wife and putting his career at stake, this is a portrait of a man slowly losing his grip on reality as he, ironically, helps Spielrein ascend upwards from her personal repression. Fassbender is absolutely riveting in each and every step along his character’s journey – from pensive scholar to frustrated intellectual to finally his profound depths as a broken, weary man.

A Dangerous Method mostly belongs to Spielrein/Knightley, who while draped in period garb and given an overall polish, is very much of the Cronenberg milieu. She’s creature rising up from sex and violence, alternately restrained and liberated by one society and another, and released upon the world to enact change. No matter how much varnish is used on the exterior, it doesn’t take much to peak beneath the surface and see that Cronenberg is and he always is. And god bless him for it.