If you’ve taken a psychology course at any point in your life, you’ve heard about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. If you can’t quite place them and need a refresher, just think sex and anger. You probably have an idea in your head of how they lived and behaved in the early 1900s — stiff suits, carriage rides, heady academic discussions, handwritten letters, etc. And you’re right.
In “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s take on the relationship between these two prominent early psychologists, you get pretty much exactly what you expect. Nothing more, nothing less. And that’s the problem. It’s about as straightforward and obvious as movies come.
Now, this is the same David Cronenberg who delivered to the world, for better or worse, “Videodrome” and “The Fly,” probably two of the most bizarre mainstream films ever released, and “eXistenZ,” which, just look at that spelling and punctuation! It’s so wacky! And even more recently, he’s released “A History of Violence,” a sexed-up suburban bloodbath, and “Eastern Promises,” which featured a totally badass Viggo Mortensen in a naked brawl in a sauna in Turkey. Now, how many movies have THAT? Up until recently, the only thing to expect with a Cronenberg film was the unexpected. And whether a movie was good or bad (and he _has_ made some bad ones) it was never boring or straightforward, and it was never obvious. So, uh, what happened, dude?
And even if you take away the Cronenberg factor and pretend this movie was made by someone else, it still has problems.
For one thing, the acting is wildly inconsistent. The three main actors seem to have taken a Goldilocks approach to their performances. Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein is too hot, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung is too cold, and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud is, as always, just right. One minute I was silently yelling at Knightley to please just calm the hell down, the next I was pleading with Fassbender to please just wake the hell up, and all the while I was begging both of them to just look at Mortensen and see a believable, engaging performance is, in fact, possible, even within the realm of such a beige, flaccid film.
The worst thing about “A Dangerous Method” is it represents such a wasted opportunity. I’m not talking about the talent involved being wasted, though they are, but about the fact the film skirts around and barely nudges some genuinely and profoundly interesting psychological themes that should have been further explored. The moments when Jung and Freud (and later, Spielrein and Freud) face off in debates and discussions about the fledgling and controversial theories of the time were by far the most stirring and well-written moments in the film. But there simply weren’t enough of them, nor did they go far enough. The film instead chooses to focus more on the hot-and-cold relationship between Jung and Spielrein, which isn’t necessarily uninteresting in itself, but isn’t new, exciting or provocative, either. And honestly, if he wanted to focus so much on the coital, he might have been wise to choose a more buxom leading lady.
I can’t shake the feeling Cronenberg was purposefully holding back, although I’d be hard-pressed to find a reasonable explanation for it. And the preference of the sexual affair over the more interesting psychological theorization is the perfect case study for that restraint. It’s almost as if he doesn’t trust the audience to be engaged in scientific discourse, so he soft lobs them an easily-digested, simple love affair between doctor and patient. Why? A distrust of the audience’s willingness to _go there_ has never stopped him in the past.
Maybe he’s just affirming what Freud claimed and defended until his death: everything _is_ just about sex. But I’m not buying it.
2 out of 5 stars