A Not Terribly Dangerous Method

In the opening of A Dangerous Method a horse-drawn carriage speeds down a road. The agonized face of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is seen through the windows as she thrashes about. Arriving at its destination, the carriage door opens and Spielrein is taken away by some nice young men in clean white coats. She is given a room and met by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) who will be her therapist, aiming to cure the fits of hysteria which plague her. Jung is calm and measured, almost to the point of being stoic, and he treats his patient pleasantly. He explains that his therapy will involve talking to her as he sits behind her and she tries to avoid looking at him. It's the latest cure for mental maladies devised by the sage in Vienna, Sigmund Freud.

With Jung in the background asking questions, Sabina writhes in her chair as she does her level best to answer them. This scene is the closest the film gets to the David Cronenberg of yore with his desire to distort, augment, and pick apart the human body. Knightley contorts her exceedingly bony body with her lower jaw looking like it is about to become unhinged. Sabina admits that, as a girl, she became sexually aroused when spanked by her father.

The movie flash forwards a couple years and Sabina has made significant progress. Her bouts of hysteria have stopped and Jung encourages her to pursue her dream of a career in psychanalysis. Jung is introduced to Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and the two quickly become friends, bonding over the meaning of dreams and the various conflicts of the id, ego, and superego. In addition to befriending the great Freud, Jung has remained a friend and mentor to Sabina with a sexual attraction bubbling just beneath the surface. Otto Gross then enters the picture. (A fantastic and too fleeting role for Vincent Cassell.) A former protégé of Freud, Gross discusses his views with Jung which involve a total disrespect for monogamy and the mantra "Repress nothing."

This sets Jung off on a new course. He is married but embarks on an affair with Sabina. His interests also collide with Freud's. An atheist, Freud held fast to science while Jung harbored pseudo-religious beliefs such as that there no meaningless coincidences – synchronicity. The two have their legendary falling out and Jung is no longer able to continue his affair.

A Dangerous Method was based on play which explains the focus remains on just three characters. There are some great scenes but Cronenberg is never able to integrate them into the larger story very well. For instance, early on Jung enlists Sabina as an assistant in a word association experiment. The subject is Jung's wife, Emma. He uses a rather weird device which I presume measured the conductivity of her hands – like a primitive polygraph machine. A coil is wound up and other devices are calibrated, Emma's hands are placed on gold pads, and a switch is thrown which presumably gets the juice flowing. Emma is in foreground on the far left side of the frame while Jung is sitting with his back to the camera on the right. In front of him sits Sabina who adjusts some part of the device. Jung says a word and Emma tells him the first thing that comes to her mind. It's a wonderful scene that bounces back and forth between the Jung's faces with pregnant pauses where Emma is slow to devise an answer.

Unfortunately the script has Sabina give her assessment of the experiment – the Jung's marriage is not in great shape – instead of leaving the audience to cull this from the facial expressions, pauses, and answers. I wish the script had found another way of letting us know that Carl and Emma's marriage is having troubles and that Sabina was aware of this. As it is, it felt insulting to have it spelled out for me in big letters. Furthermore, Emma is a peripheral character and this wonderful scene seems wasted on someone who has a very small role throughout the rest of the film.

I was also disappointed by the spanking scenes. Part of Jung and Sabina's relationship involves him administering some good slaps across her bum. There are a couple brief shots of this but their subversive and erotic potential is squandered. These scenes tell us very little beyond the fact that they are having a fling with a modicum of BDSM involved. I didn't feel they shed much light on Sabina or Jung. Did they intend to tell me she was sexually liberated? Was I supposed to infer that Jung was a top? I just was not able to relate the spanking to much of the characters' actions or dialogue outside of the bedroom.

Similarly, the film didn't develop the relationship between Freud and Jung enough. When they do part ways, it doesn't seem all that tragic to me. Freud is avuncular and friendly but he also views Jung as being inferior. I get the ideas that drove a wedge between the two men but the emotional break was paltry. I think the film needed to be longer so that Jung's relationships with both Sabina and Freud got more time to develop.

Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky is a long-time associate of Cronenberg's and there's some great photography here. The early part of the movie is dominated by scenes having Jung and Sabina's faces both facing the camera. This type of framing contrasts with the shot-reverse-shot scheme for most scenes where Jung is talking to Emma. Seeing both Jung and Sabina's faces at the same time hints at their budding attraction but this framing device is basically dropped after their affection they have for one another is known.

While certainly not a bad film, I thought that A Dangerous Method lacked a visceral punch. For a story about the potency of sex and love, both the characters and the power of erotic desire all felt like they were dealt with at arm's length.