Film Review: A Dangerous Method

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are probably the two most famous psychologists of all time, especially since their ideas have influenced a lot more than just psychological thinking. David Cronenberg‘s film A Dangerous Method tells the story of the relationship between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) and a woman named Sabina (Keira Knightley) who had a considerable influence on both of them.

The cinematic teaming of Freud and Jung is something many have surely been waiting for and having David “The Baron of Blood” Cronenberg direct this film surely must have had many positively salivating over the idea. We also have Viggo Mortensen playing Freud and Michael Fassbender playing Jung. So this can’t go wrong, can it?

Well, in some ways, it works. The actors are both uniformly strong, Mortensen and Fassbender are hardly capable of being bad and they do their jobs commendably though not quite exceptionally. And all the production values in this movie are also quite handsome.

But sadly other facets of the film, notably the script, are not as strong.

The film starts promisingly with a screaming Sabina being brought to Carl Jung and they soon start talking about things like repressed sex, perverted tendencies and her relationship with her parents. The movie continues to tackle these fascinating issues throughout. But the problem is that is rarely does anything interesting with them. It starts well and seems for a while like it might go to some fascinating places but in the end it doesn’t manage it.

The whole movie is simply too flat, as it trundles on in a similar register throughout most of the running time and rarely comes to life. Not much happens, there’s really no grand plot to speak of and there are few real surprises. It’s all very handsome and dignified but also faintly dull and unexciting.

A Dangerous Method feels too obviously like a stage adaptation (it is based on the play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the film’s screenplay (the play itself is based on a book)), as it’s too literal and stagy. There’s a lot of talk, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but the visuals don’t complement it well enough and the talk is just not as exciting as it should be. The movie takes few chances and it’s really nothing more than some sort of “masterpiece theatre” movie done in a fuddy-duddy style that rarely feels very Cronenbergian.

It’s clear why Cronenberg would like to do a movie on Freud and Jung as all his films have dealt with psychological and sexual issues and he’s often played with psychological metaphors in very interesting and unique ways. But this time he didn’t write the screenplay and doesn’t manage to impose his personality strongly enough on the material. This movie could almost just as well have been directed by the likes of Stephen Daldry. Why did he chose this dull way to tell this story instead of just write his own script and play with history in his own way? Is he getting softer in his old age (He’s 68)? It’s been more than a decade since he made a film after his own script (eXistenZ was the last one), let’s hope he’ll write a script or two on his own before he retires.

The problem may partly be that the film adheres too closely with what really happened, which might be fine as a book and maybe as a play, but as a movie it’s just not that exciting. Sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction but most of the time how things really happened doesn’t really work a cinema narrative. This is the case here, which makes A Dangerous Method a rather shapeless movie.

But as mentioned before there’s still something to like here. The actors and the production values are enough to make the film at least semi-watchable and it does at least occasionally catch fire. Vincent Cassell appears as one of Jung’s patients and is clearly the standout performer in this movie, bringing much-needed life to it. Mortensen and Fassbender are solid but are perhaps hampered by the material. Knightley gets a flashy role and gives what is definitely one of her better performances though her Russian accent tends to come and go.

Final Verdict: A real disappointment. Flat, didactic, stagy and conventional. Not to mention shapeless. Strong performance and handsome production values make it watchable and Cronenberg occasionally shows his colors but he really should start writing his own scripts again instead of wasting his time on this “masterpiece theatre” stuff. Not exactly bad but it should have and could have been so much better, so much more colorful and exciting. Instead, A Dangerous Method is rather dull and unmemorable.

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