Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.The history of pairing historical figures in fictional films is a mostly unfortunate one -- bold-face names facing off in situations contrived for maximum melodrama. David Cronenberg's scalpel-sharp rendering of the psychosexual triangle between Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein (a patient, and later therapist in her own right, who fascinated them both) almost falls prey to this failing. But a trio of astonishingly committed performances and a taut screenplay free of hyperbole and overstatement keep this drama relatively free of melodramatic pitfalls, while still relating a fully engaging story of an intellectual love triangle.
For all his obsessions with bodily fluids and tissue (and the excreting and viscous rendering thereof), Cronenberg has always been something of a fussy director. That tidiness can be overwhelming and stultifying in cases like Crash, where his own reticence piled up with the source novel's clinical distance to create the film equivalent of viewing an accident through many panes of glass, darkly. In A Dangerous Method, the filmmaker's inclination towards coolness is plain to see in its nearly too-tasteful surroundings. Set in a number of fine homes and clinics in pre-World War I Austria, the film's vistas are all spectacular (manicured lawns, sharp blue lakes, and lush green trees) and the rooms rendered with crisp and bright, catalog-ready neatness. There's nary a dust mote or stray hair to be seen here.
Christopher Hampton's screenplay (adapted from his play The Talking Cure, itself based on John Kerr's nonfiction book A Most Dangerous Method) is just as cool and tidy. This is remarkable, given the story's opening in which Spielrein (Keira Knightley, bravely taking on a performance which can't help but be over-the-top) is sent hurling and howling into the picture. She lunges and screams in the back of a carriage hauling her down picturesque lanes toward a sanitarium. There, Jung (Michael Fassbender) engages her in the not new but still novel "talking cure," in which he simply sits behind her and probes her with psychoanalytic questions. Unlike many of his patients, though, Spielrein is an intellectual herself, and fully able to grasp what he is trying to suss out. She then becomes more of an active assistant in his analysis of her than a passive patient. Jung's fascination with Spielrein's case grows, particularly the roots of her neuroses in the sexual excitement she remembers from being hit by her father in childhood, and the concomitant guilt those feelings engendered. It isn't long before that fascination shades into a deeper attraction.Spielrein's case, with its deeply knotted and highly symbolic strains of sex and guilt, is something close to a eureka moment for Jung, whose intellect seems equaled only by his ambition. Straining as he is for greater acceptance in the burgeoning psychoanalytical movement, Jung uses Spielrein as essentially his calling-card for a momentous visit to Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). The relationship that springs up between the men after their first meeting (where they talked for thirteen hours straight, a montage of scenes that Cronenberg handles with a lightly comic touch) becomes less that of a student-mentor than of a father-son: Jung idealizes Freud but also can't wait to dethrone him.
Cronenberg and Hampton have a good time playing Jung's uptight nature off of Freud's loose gregariousness. Against Fassbender's superb (if probably historically inaccurate) take on Jung, which makes him look so controlled as to be practically machine-tooled, Mortensen's Freud is expansive and generous, a welcome dose of dirty humor in this spic-and-span film. Although the deep racism embedded in much psychological thinking of the time isn't referenced, the film does take notable fact of how much more fragile Freud and Spielrein's place in this society is as Jews, as compared to Jung's thoughtlessly secure position as a moneyed Protestant.
There are a few moments that don't quite register here, particularly a going-nowhere sequence about Jung and Freud's trip to America which only seems included to showcase Jung's dismissive treatment of his supposed mentor. But the performances (particularly a showy turn by Vincent Cassel as a seductively amoral patient of Jung's) are electric, and the story deeply engaging on intellectual and personal levels, albeit with a heavy dose of stiff psychoanalytic terminology). A Dangerous Method is a deftly handled historical drama in which the darkest demons are hauled out on stage for all to evaluate.
