Has any North American filmmaker led us further into the labyrinths of the human psyche than David Cronenberg? Since making his name in the early 80s with a trio of bizarre horror movies—Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986)—the Canadian writer-director has ventured into progressively more challenging psychological territory, exploring narcotics addiction (Naked Lunch), the sex-death instinct (Crash), the treacherous workings of memory (Spider), and our appetite for carnage (A History of Violence). Given that track record, the source material for his latest drama might seem like an ideal property: John Kerr’s 1993 nonfiction book A Most Dangerous Method, about the scintillating but ultimately fractious professional friendship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. For a filmmaker so curious about the mechanisms of the mind, what better project could there be than a biopic about the two great founders of psychoanalysis?
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A Dangerous Method, which opens Friday at Landmark’s Century Centre and Century 12/CineArts 6, never really delivers on that promise, mainly because its scenes of two brilliant men discussing the nature of the subconscious can’t compare with Cronenberg’s visual rendering of that subconscious in earlier movies. Certainly there’s some juicy stuff here: the story revolves around Jung’s tempestuous relationship with Sabina Spielrein, a deeply troubled young medical student who began as his patient, became his mistress, blackmailed him into referring her to Freud as a patient, and ultimately distinguished herself as a psychoanalytic theorist of some note. But in the movie this leads to an odd dichotomy between the drily cerebral and the powerfully sexual: on the one hand, decorous scenes of intellectual jousting between the two esteemed gentlemen, and on the other, primal shots of Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Spielrein (Keira Knightley) getting it on, which culminate in a bound Spielrein shouting with pleasure as Jung spanks her with a leather belt. (Regardless of the rating above, I give this scene four stars, an A+, and two thumbs up.)
The convoluted intellectual politics of Zurich and Vienna having been discarded, A Dangerous Method functions less as a social history than as a philosophical drama, centered on Jung and using other characters as embodiments of a single idea. (This design makes more sense if we remember that psychology had its roots not in medicine but in philosophy.) The opening scenes show the virile young physician enjoying a settled home life with his beautiful and doting wife, Emma (Sarah Gadon), whose successive pregnancies have put a damper on their sex life. His adoring friendship with Freud (Viggo Mortensen) takes on the contours of a father-son relationship and, as Jung outgrows the older man’s strict doctrine, the very Oedipal complex that Freud proposed as the core of human psychology. Spielrein represents the self-destructive urge that she herself would later examine as a writer, inspiring Freud’s idea of the death instinct. Last but not least, there’s the dissolute psychoanalyst Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), who preaches personal freedom above all else and urges Jung to accept Spielrein’s sexual advances.
Directed by David Cronenberg ★ ★
