Keira Knightley is the woman who fascinated both Freud and Jung in 'A Dangerous Method.'
In A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg analyzes the analysts. It’s an adaptation of a play, but like Carnage by Roman Polanski, it isn’t quite fully adapted. People stand and deliver their lines, and don’t leave rooms where they’re unwelcome, as they do in real life or in the movies.
Cronenberg critiques Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) as self-deluding, self-promoting opportunist doctors wandering in the dark. The two giants of psychiatry are illuminated by a woman neglected by history: Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a masochistic hysteria patient of Jung. Jung is seduced by her vulnerability, which of course may be a way of saying that he finds something thrilling in her urge to be hurt. It’s possible he’s drawn by tenderness; there’s something like very old-movie drama in the shyness of Jung, his guilt at betraying his blonde, wealthy and homebound wife (Sarah Gadon).
For this role, Fassbender dons prim spectacles and a waxed mustache. There’s an air of panic in him, a fixed stare magnified by the eyeglasses. The doctor has just discovered synchronicity and is worried at the implication of every creaking piece of wood.
Mortensen’s Freud is more worldly; he anticipates Jew-hatred and is always ready for the riposte. He’s a harder man. The idea of the pair in some adventure (pursuing Moriarty to the Swiss waterfalls, let’s say) seems workable: they harmonize. But the woman between them keeps them off-key. As for Knightley’s performance, it’s a catastrophe: a series of strange contortions, funny accenting and gnashing of teeth. The most dangerous thing in A Dangerous Method is her set of dangerous choppers.
Amid the talky story of the gamesmanship between the doctors, there are moments of nostalgia for old architecture and furnishings, as in the lair of Freud, with its masks and idols. Cronenberg has made a few films regarding the pathology of physicians—most notably Dead Ringers, from a similar blueprint of a pair of doctors encircling a woman. He’s turned from the out-and-out psychological horror of the past to a Dangerous Liaisons–style battle of attraction and snobbery. And nothing could be more like watching water trying to boil.
A Dangerous Method
R; 99 min.
Plays countywide
