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Film Review: "A Dangerous Method"
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Katie Buenneke | October 6, 2011
Theater Editor

"A Dangerous Method" in theaters Nov. 23
"A Dangerous Method" in theaters Nov. 23
David Cronenberg's newest movie, "A Dangerous Method," provides an interesting look at the psychiatric field in the early 1900s.

The film, which follows a young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) as he first employs Sigmund Freud's (Viggo Mortensen) "talking cure" on a young patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), provides insight into the beginnings of psychoanalysis. The topic itself could be either incredibly boring or really quite interesting depending on how it's presented, yet the film somehow manages to walk right down the middle. While the movie doesn't necessarily have viewers on the edge of their seats, it still manages to keep their attention.

Part of this is probably due to the pacing. "A Dangerous Method" is a very lingering film, with a general sense of laissez-faire. To some extent, the actors reflect this; both Fassbender and Mortensen deliver lovely, if understated performances.

Keira Knightley's performance is by turns similar to her co-stars' and surprisingly unrealistic. At the beginning of the film, Sabina is afflicted by a mysterious condition, and Knightley seems to only be convincing herself that she is genuinely afflicted — it mostly comes off as an actress playing pretend. However, as the talking cure begins to work on Sabina, Knightley's performance improves drastically. Vincent Cassel makes a dangerously charming appearance as the hedonist Otto Gross.

The real highlight of the movie is the relationship between Jung and Freud. The movie itself does not tell a story so much as offer a look into the lives of these two historic psychologists. Fassbender and Mortensen play off of each other well, illustrating what happens when two great minds collide. Mortensen, in particular (who looks like much more than a decade has passed since his portrayal of Aragorn in "Lord of the Rings"), turns in a very enjoyable performance.

"A Dangerous Method" is a beautiful movie, with incredibly picturesque scenery. However, the editing is choppy at times, which can be disorienting, and the sound mixing is hyperrealistic, slightly detracting from the world of the film. Also, given that the movie takes place over the span of eight years, it is slightly jarring that the appearance of the actors does not change at all (other than when some of the females are pregnant, and babies grow up); Sabina, who begins the film age 18 and ends it 26, looks the exact same throughout.

As a whole, the movie is generally well done, but intangibly disappointing. It's a nice enough film, but nothing really stands out about it.

Reach Katie here.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erica-abeel/a-dangerous-method-david-cronenberg_b_1000935.html

A Dangerous Method Is an Action Movie for Grownups
Posted: 10/9/11 03:30 PM ET

In A Dangerous Method, which just premiered at the New York Film Festival, David Cronenberg has fashioned the thinking person's action movie. Instead of cars exploding and weapons blasting, great minds duel over the forces driving human behavior during the period that saw the burgeoning of psychoanalysis.

That this three-way biopic is so textured and rich makes it hard to sum up. The short version: Hugging historical fact, Method depicts the impassioned triangle formed by fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and the troubled yet gifted patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) who comes between them. Seduced by the challenge of an impossible case, the ambitious Jung takes on Sabina as his patient, attempting to cure her hysteria with the new "talking cure." Turns out she has a daddy fetish and was aroused by his beatings. Seduced by her intelligence and beauty, the married Jung violates the doctor/patient relationship and becomes Sabina's lover, salting their encounters with the thrashings she finds exciting. Guilt over professional ethics triggers Jung's breakup with Sabina. She becomes Freud's patient -- and eventually a pioneering child psychologist -- while Jung and Freud part ways..

I recently sat down with director David Cronenberg to discuss the challenge of capturing these complex and fascinating figures on screen.


Erica Abeel: The film was originally a play, The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton. Yet unlike some theater to screen adaptations, you've succeeded in opening it up.

David Cronenberg: Ironically it was a screenplay before it was a play. Christopher had originally written it for Julia Roberts to play Sabina about 17 years ago and for various reasons the movie didn't happen. But it wasn't hard for me to see that play as a movie. The theater constrained it. Because you know there are scenes that take place at the vast Burgholzi [asylum] and on Lake Zurich. The play was artificially compressed. So to make it a movie was just to give it a normal breathing space.

EA: The movie dramatizes ideas and the period's intellectual ferment with whip-smart dialogue between brilliant people. It's rare to see that in cinema today.

DC: It's so rare. The idea in cinema today -- especially, of course, in Hollywood -- is that any obsessiveness or dynamism has to do with physical action and never with speech and ideas. These people were not only incredibly articulate -- they were passionate about their ideas. And the ideas were not just abstractions; they wanted to incorporate them in their own lives, bodies, relationships. It was a great era. These people were all deeply cultured and artistically aware and that's what I got excited about.

EA: A lot of indie films seem to celebrate mumbling, bumbling and general inarticulateness.

DC: That was true of On the Waterfront. But that was the era of socially responsible movies. The feeling was there could be poetry amongst people even if they weren't educated. But what you are commenting on is that anti-intellectual is seen as a positive thing, which is kind of disastrous really, and cuts out such potential for movies. For me what is essentially cinematic is a human face speaking. That's what we shoot the most, as filmmakers. I don't find that innately theatrical. I find that cinematic. If you've got a fantastic face saying amazing things you've really got something.

EA: How did you assemble your cast?

DC: Casting is a black art. People don't know what you're juggling. A Dangerous Method is a Canadian/German co- production. Viggo has a Danish passport. There are no Americans in this movie because of the co-production agreement. You can't just cast anybody you want. They have to want to be in the movie, you have to be able to afford them, they have to be available, and the right age.

EA: The quirkiest choice is Viggo Mortensen as Freud.

DA: This is not the grandfatherly, ailing Freud that everyone knows. In the film -- he's fifty at the time -- he's a handsome, charismatic, virile leader of a disparate group, whipping them into an actual movement that was very successful. Jung was only twenty-nine when we meet him, ambitious, charismatic, very attractive to women. Once you have that handle on the characters and dispense with stereotypical ideas of what these guys were and go to what the reality was, it gets exciting and you can think of Viggo as Freud. It's not obvious casting, but it works.

EA: In the hysteria scenes in the beginning, I thought Keira Knightley might be over-acting.

DC: You were wrong to think she was overacting. You had to blame me for that. If I felt she was overacting, I'd just have to say tone it down and she would. But you have to understand: that was an accurate portrayal of hysteria. She's brought to a clinic because she can't function; she's been kicked out of other asylums because they can't deal with her. I have to tell you, the audience, why she's in such bad shape and needs to be incarcerated in an asylum. She can't just sit there and be mildly neurotic. We know what her symptoms were from Jung's paper. Hers is actually a very subdued portrayal of hysteria. When you see footage of hysterical patients -- which exists -- it's unwatchable. So we had to find the right level.

EA: In past films you've shown a penchant for violence and transgression. Would you say the spanky-panky element is a Cronenberg signature?

DC: But Sabina's symptoms were exactly that. It's in Christopher Hampton's screenplay and well documented. She was aroused when her father beat her. That's not me, that's her.

EA: Still, your inclusion of that element in her scenes with Jung gives the relationship a kinky flavor.

DC: These obsessive, passionate people were trying to incorporate their own ideas into their lives. Otto Gross [a renegade shrink] encouraged Jung to sleep with his patients because he believed it therapeutic.

Gross: "You should take [Sabina] somewhere and thrash her within an inch of her life. That's obviously what she wants. Why deny her such a simple pleasure?"
Jung: "Pleasure is never simple, as you know."
Gross: "Of course it is. That's why we're driving ourselves crazy. Because we complicate these things that are actually very straightforward."
He did really say that to Jung, we have the letter. It was not much of a jump that Jung should give her what she wanted, which was a kind of catharsis to relive the beatings that her father gave her, but in an adult erotic relationship. Like an exorcism of her father.

EA: So it was therapeutic on Jung's part?

DC: We played it that way. If you watch Jung's face, you see that he's not really enjoying it. He's a little disconcerted, a little disturbed, but he's doing it for her. And she meanwhile, in one of the scenes she was watching herself. They were the kind of people who, even while they were having sex, would be observing themselves and noticing their own reactions and incorporating that into their theories. Until she had sex Sabina could not have come up with the death instinct and the idea of the dissolution of the personality during the sex act. It's all very straightforward, and not very kinky. Well, maybe a little bit.

EA: I was also struck by Freud's solidarity with Sabina as a fellow Jew.

DC: Freud was very aware of his Jewishness and that his psychoanalytic movement could be dismissed as Jewish mysticism because everybody involved were Jews. He really wanted Jung to lead the movement. He was a Swiss German Christian, and reputable, and that meant the movement would have more credibility. When that collapsed, Freud felt, This is natural that I should be betrayed by an Aryan. We're back to being all Jews together and that includes you Miss Spielrein, who have now been rejected by your lover. As a Jew you should expect this. Freud was being a little paranoid. The times were very anti-Semitic. To be a Jew [in Vienna] meant you were a second class citizen, if not third.

EA: AS Jung Fassbender is brilliant at conveying a kind of starchy coldness.

DC: What's touching is that only at the end of the movie do you realize how much in love Jung was with Sabina and how crushing it was to him to lose her.

http://www.buzzsugar.com/Dangerous-Method-Movie-Review-19479035

A Dangerous Method Movie Review
New York Film Festival Takeaway: A Dangerous Method
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Allie Merriam / October 9, 2011 5:30 am

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is one of the most-anticipated movies showing at the New York Film Festival, which kicked off last weekend and continues on until Oct. 16. Cronenberg and one of his leading men, Michael Fassbender, joined writer Christopher Hampton in the Big Apple this week to present the picture and conduct a Q&A for press. I was able to check out the screening and hear a little of what Michael, David, and Christopher had to say.

Who's behind it? David Cronenberg was behind the lens, teaming up with regular colleague Viggo Mortensen for the third time, after the men also worked together on A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Mortensen plays Dr. Sigmund Freud, along with Fassbender's psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a hysterical patient who turns her interest in medicine into a doctorate. The script is from Atonement's Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the play, The Talking Cure, on which the movie is based.
What's it about? A Dangerous Method is based on Freud, Spielrein, and Jung's real lives. Spielrein and Jung first cross paths when she's admitted to his Zurich clinic, and it's there that she's introduced to his and Freud's psychoanalytic method. Jung shares with Freud a belief that many, if not most, psychological problems are rooted in sex. Spielrein seems to agree, and her relationship with Jung became both personal and professional. Jung later visits with his friend Sigmund in Vienna on a sort of hero-worshipping pilgrimage. However, on a trip to America, the men have a falling out over Jung's spiritualism, to which Freud is opposed. Hampton's story examines the effects of Jung and Spielrein's affair on their careers, families, and professional futures.

To read what I thought about the movie, just read more.

What did I think? I was excited to see this film because of the amazing combination of Fassbender, Cronenberg, and Mortensen. Unfortunately, the screenplay wandered and went on too long — at 99 minutes long, I was still ready for the film to be over around 80. It felt very much like a play-turned-film. Despite the meandering, the movie is still worth seeing for the great acting, luscious settings, and a subject matter ripe for a sensational story. Some are whispering that Knightley's turn as Spielrein could earn her an Oscar nomination, but I thought her hysterical scenes seemed a bit overdone. Fassbender, though, shines as always, as does Mortensen.

Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/archives/new_york_film_festival_2011_entry_3_-_quickie_review_of_david_cronenbergs_a/

New York Film Festival 2011 Entry #3 - Quickie Review Of David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”

Alright… moving right along. As I promised, here are my brief thoughts on David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method; might do a fuller review closer to its general release date (November 23rd) after I’ve seen it again, and had more time to ponder it.

I really wanted to like this more - much more than I actually did. David Cronenberg directing Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, and Vincent Cassell? I’m there almost every damn time, regardless of the subject matter. These are actors, and a director I have immense respect for, given their past work.

But it didn’t take long into the film for my buzz-kill to happen, when one of the its central characters (Sabina Spielrein) played by Keira Knightley, was introduced. I think she’s miscast here. To be honest, I haven’t seen much of the young actress’ work, so I’m not informed enough to offer critique of her acting abilities; but she was more of a distraction, especially in the early scenes depicting her character’s hysteria, in which Knightley overly writhes and cowers, playing opposite a rather stiff Fassbender.

And the fact that she’s in just about every 3rd scene hindered my ability to finally and fully settle into the experience of watching and appreciating the work; although, to her credit, the material is challenging, and she does fare well enough in some later sequences.

The story is based on real life events – the early days of psychoanalysis, and the falling-out of Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Fassbender) over a hysterical patient who would later become Sabina Spielrein, one of the first female psychoanalysts. It’s a combined character study as well as a history lesson, covering the 9 or so year period, from 1904 to 1913, that these characters were introduced to one another, *intermingled*, and eventually grew apart, both physically as well as in ideological thought.

And if you’re not already somewhat familiar with the material, a second viewing might be necessary to fully grasp the ideas that are introduced and dissected here.

It’s what I’d call an intelligent film; smart and dialogue-heavy, with no real moments to chew and digest it all. So you’re forced to listen intently, so as to ensure that you’re following all the critical threads! If anything, that alone should help keep you engaged. But it might also be frustrating to the impatient. Although this is also what I’d call an adult film - not necessarily in terms of its depictions of sexuality (although there are a few *risque* scenes), but rather the fact that it requires a mature mind to appreciate.

I did expect it to be far more darker and even dare I say, dangerous, to borrow from the film’s title. It’s quite cold and even sterile. I would have preferred something that really delved into the grit and grime of it all. After all we’re talking psychoanalysis. Cronenberg did mention during the Q&A that followed that his intention was to present a work that was as true to the real-life events and characters it’s based on, and so maybe what’s on screen is indeed an accurate depiction of the real-life drama the film highlights. But, while it’s certainly “well-dressed,” as one of my colleagues put it in a conversation that followed after the screening, with mostly wonderfully subtle performances from Fassbender and Mortensen notably, the film is maybe Cronenberg’s safest, and least provocative, despite such deliciously dangerous subject matter having to do with the entanglement of the psychological with the physical.

I was actually surprised at how often I chuckled. It’s definitely not a comedy, although there are certainly some comedic moments – mostly intentional; not the hysterical kind; subtle. However, considered from another angle altogether, especially with Knightley’s Acting (note the capital “A”), Mortensen’s nose prosthetic (aiding him in disappearing into his role as Freud), and Fassbender’s deadpan earnestness, one could watch this film and see a farce instead.

It’s at times too stodgy – overly formal and pompous; Fassbender and Mortensen certainly seem to be having a good time portraying these men of psychoanalytics legend.

So, for me, it was a mixed bag. I didn’t love it (certainly won’t be on my Cronenberg short list), but I didn’t despise it either. I was engaged in moments, but did peek at my watch once or twice.

I just expected something quite different, and not so ordinary. The acting is its strength. With a different cast, this could have been some tedious melodrama. And Cronenberg realizes that he needs to allow the work to happen in front of the camera, with seemingly little technically to distract.

See it if it opens in your city.

That’s it!

I see the much-talked about Shame tomorrow morning at 10am; Michael Fassbender stars in that as well, so a coup for him during awards season this year. I’ll aim to review that film soon thereafter. Also, I owe you a review of Sleeping Sickness.

tambay posted to Film Festival, Review at 10:27 pm on October 5, 2011

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/52735/dangerous-method-a/

A Dangerous Method
Sony Pictures // R // October 5, 2011
Review by Jason Bailey | posted October 5, 2011
Reviewed at the 2011 New York Film Festival

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method is a film that grows upon reflection; even considering the filmmaker's more austere recent efforts, it is a picture that the viewer keeps waiting to ignite, and never quite does. But it nestles itself into the mind, where its quirks and complexities continue to reverberate long after the credits have rolled. The filmmakers clearly could have chosen to shoot the works, to ratchet up the raunchiness and high drama; instead, the picture is drawn in finer strokes, and its closing shots cause the viewer to reevaluate all that has come before. It is not the film you expect, but it sticks with you.

And it has, at its center, a performance by Keira Knightley that is astonishing in its depth and power. She opens the picture with a howl, a sustained wail of despair and discomfort as her Sabrina Speilrein is brought to the madhouse, where she becomes a test case for young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his Freud-inspired experimental treatment, "the talking cure." There will be no surgeries and no electroshock--"just talk." Even the acting of talking is a trial for Speilrein, and Knightley's work in these early scenes, as she wrenches the words out of her character's mouth in jutted stutters and tortured bursts, is remarkable. It's not what you would call a subtle performance (nor should it be, all things considered), but there are subtleties to it: the sparseness of her movements when she's seated in their sessions (the camera regards her as Jung does, from behind), the way her dark eyes flash with fury.

Her treatment is a success, and Jung soon finds himself keeping the company of Sigmund Freud, played by Viggo Mortensen in a performance that almost become the film's dry comic relief; a cigar ever-present between his teeth, the actor manages, at one point, to get a laugh merely with a well-timed "Ah." Freud sends Jung a problematic therapist-turned-patient, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel, sporting an impish grin), who delights in detailing for the good Dr. Jung exactly how he seduces his patients. This is inopportune timing for Jung, who finds himself powerfully drawn to the charms of the cured Sabrina. "Do not pass by the oasis without stopping to drink," advises Otto sagely.

We can feel director Cronenberg getting a little impatient in the lead-up to Sabrina and Jung's dalliance--this is what he's most interested in, and frankly, so are we. But even in those early scenes, the simmer before the rolling boil, Cronenberg's direction is precise and studied without being suffocating, and he finds every exploitable angle in Christopher Hampton's witty, literate, and highly quotable screenplay. This is an expert filmmaker in total control--of the surprisingly expansive timeframe, of the considerable emotional turmoil, of the psychological texture in the narrative. The rivalry between Jung and Freud brews slowly and sensationally, as jealousy and sex and mental stimulation all get bound up with each other.

Knightley's in not a one-trick performance. Once she is "cured" (after a fashion, anyway), she peels away the tics while maintaining her earlier intensity. There's a fierce eroticism in her work that nearly overtakes the picture; the way her eyes burn when she listens to Jung talk about monogamy nearly sends the whole scene into the stratosphere. Fassbender, meanwhile, more than measures up--for most of the running time, his is a crisp, measured piece of work, choosing to show only the cool, hard surface, but in the third act, he cracks that surface elegantly. For that matter, so does the film. A Dangerous Method is not quite the scorching bodice-ripper promised by the ads,. But the good news is, it's more interesting than that.

Jason lives with his wife Rebekah and their two cats in New York and is pursuing an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism at NYU. He blogs at Fourth Row Center and is yet another critic with a Twitter feed. He also blogs for Flavorwire and is a contributor to the Village Voice and the Maddow Blog.

http://twitchfilm.com/reviews/2011/10/nyff-2011-a-dangerous-method-review.php

NYFF 2011: A DANGEROUS METHOD Review

by Peter Gutierrez, October 5, 2011 9:19 PM
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Continental Europe & Russia, Drama, NYFF 2011, Toronto Film Festival 2011, UK, Ireland, Australia & New Zealand, USA & Canada
During yesterday's press conference at Lincoln Center, director David Cronenberg insisted he doesn't think about his past pictures while engaged in the making of a new one. That doesn't mean that audiences, and more specifically his legions of fans--and I'm one of them, let's get that disclosure out of the way--won't instantly see the thematic similarity between A Dangerous Method and, well, practically his entire body of work. To horror-philes who care little for other genres, the period drama trappings of this new film may be off-putting, but I'll hazard that to most everyone else it stands a good chance of showing up looking a bit like a crowning achievement. Cronenberg himself reminded the press in attendance that he took clinical psychology as the topic for his very first film, the short Transference, and of course we've seen medical men, scientists, and researchers on the edge, or over it, in films such as Dead Ringers, Rabid, and The Fly, to name just a few. Often their ostensibly dispassionate approach to the carnal is belied by the very passion they have for their work, or simply their passion, period. In this sense they of course represent Cronenberg surrogates, since I'm hard pressed to name other auteurs whose films so brilliantly use cerebral methods and a detached tone to reveal the vast mysteries of our corporeal selves.

My gendered phrase "medical men" in the above was intentional, as male authority and its expression in social institutions such as medicine are frequently the subject of critique in Cronenberg films. In this context, A Dangerous Method is notable for how explicitly it dramatizes the notion of intellectual authority and the struggle to achieve/maintain it--and of course in this respect we should give credit to the source texts, a play and a nonfiction book, not to mention the real-life Freud and Jung, for providing such juicy conflict in the first place. But even more importantly, A Dangerous Method throws a monkey-wrench into gender-politics-as-usual by having a female character, Sabina Spielrein, so convincingly convey, and represent, a point of view that refreshingly steers clear from Father-Son tensions altogether. A patient herself--the film opens with the memorable image of her "hysteria" contained in a horse-drawn carriage--Spielrein comes to function, through her insightful theories gleaned from experience, as an ego-less vehicle for the true advancement of psychoanalysis on its most profound levels. I must confess, though, that despite the centrality of the character to the narrative, I was initially taken aback by Keira Knightley's top-billing in the credits (and poster, now that I think of it). After all, wasn't this a film about Freud and Jung, portrayed by Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender (my nominee for actor of the year) respectively, both of whom give what strike me as not only flawless performances, but extremely generous ones? In addition, Knightley's jaw-thrusting, de-glammed performance, complete with Streepesque Russian accent, initially came across as Oscar-bait that turned me off even as it impressed from the standpoint of pure technique.

Yet a funny thing happened as the narrative progressed. Spielrein became more dimensional, and consequently so did Knightley's acting. In fact, by the time things concluded, I was not surprised to learn via screenwriter/playwright Christopher Hampton that his original text was titled Sabina, and focused on her. His film script, however, like the stage play before it, takes Jung as our protagonist. And yet, as is clear from the film itself in numerous sly ways and Cronenberg's own verbal admission, his philosophical sympathies lie squarely with Freud (Jungians will be disappointed by not a single mention of the words "collective unconscious" or "archetype"). Oh, and that's not all. Throw into the mix the counterpoint of Id-driven Otto Gross, played by Vincent Cassel in what's not just his best English-speaking role, but one that benefits hugely from the badboy charisma of his screen persona à la Mesrine.

The result is an extraordinarily complex and literate drama of ideas--one that just happens to be beautifully designed, shot, and edited. Yes, it does help if one is familiar with some of those ideas to begin with; if not, there is a bit of exposition here and there, some of which is awkward at least in comparison to all the dry wit and intelligence otherwise on display. Then again, for those who aren't familiar with the early days of psychoanalysis, A Dangerous Method may be even more eye-opening. Either way, though, it's a film about which I feel hesitant to make additional pronouncements at this point: it's so rich, and in so many ways, that it really needs to be re-viewed before it's reviewed.

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http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/david-cronenbergs-method/

October 5, 2011, 2:00 pm
David Cronenberg’s ‘Method’
By MEKADO MURPHY

New York Film Festival

Features, interviews and more.

While the latest film from David Cronenberg is a further departure from the psychological horror films of his early career, it does still put psychology (and psychoanalysis) at the forefront. “A Dangerous Method,” starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley, takes place on the eve of World War I and looks at the relationship between the psychiatrist Carl Jung and his mentor Sigmund Freud. That relationship shifts when Jung takes on and develops a close bond to a new patient, Sabina Spielrein, played by Ms. Knightley. The film’s screenplay was adapted by Christopher Hampton from his stage play, “The Talking Cure.” The Times’s Stephen Holden writes about “A Dangerous Method” in his notebook about films in the festival. In this video, Mr. Cronenberg discusses how he and his team used source material — letters written by the two main subjects — to create an accurate account of both the personal and professional lives of these men.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2011/10/3643222/dangerous-method-talking-cure-conducted-viggo-mortensen-and-michael-

'A Dangerous Method': A talking cure, conducted by Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender
A Talking Cure.

By Sheila OMalley

3:14 pm Oct. 6, 2011 | Tweet this article

"You'd think they knew we're on our way, bringing them the plague," Sigmund Freud says dryly to his colleague, Carl Jung, as their boat pulls into New York harbor on the eve of their joint lecture tour. The plague of psychoanalysis thus arrived in America, where it flourishes to this day.

The relationship of these two men is the topic of David Cronenberg's latest film, A Dangerous Method, based on the play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton (who also wrote the screenplay for the film). A talk-heavy, gorgeously shot film, A Dangerous Method looks at the growing rift between the older Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his younger colleague Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), with the catalyst being their shared interest in "hysterical" patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who was also Carl Jung's lover, and who eventually became a psychoanalyst herself.

A Dangerous Method is meant to be a well-balanced triptych, and with an excellent performance by Mortensen as Freud and a very good performance by Fassbender as Jung, but a wildly reaching and wildly ineffective performance by Keira Knightley, it almost gets there.

Sigmund Freud, working on his theories of psychoanalysis, came to the conclusion that everything comes from sex. Carl Jung, a younger man, experiments with Freud's talking-cure methods, but has serious reservations about the idea that sex explains everything. And Sabine eventually purges her tormented mind of her unspeakable sexual fantasies, starts sleeping with Jung, and eventually comes to the conclusion that the sex instinct and the death instinct are inextricably linked.

Sabine's contributions to the field of psychoanalysis have only recently come to be understood. It is clear in A Dangerous Method that her case of "hysteria" (a distinctly Victorian malady) spurred Freud and Jung into a competition over whose theories were the most valid, and they fought it out in paper after paper. The rupture between the men was "violent," as can be seen in their voluminous correspondence.

While Cronenberg isn't known for creating genteel period pieces, A Dangerous Method is certainly in line with the rest of his work and its obsession with the body, which you can see in The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Crash (a film focused on the linkage between sex and destruction). At a press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg was asked whom he felt more of an allegiance to, Freud or Jung. Cronenberg said he leaned toward Freud, because "I insist on the reality of the human body."

Peter Suschitzky shot A Dangerous Method, and the screen is awash in golden light, making the buildings of Vienna look like giant, luscious wedding cakes. The detail in filming is exquisite in the interiors, the costumes and the shot set-ups. Carl Jung and Sabine go for an outing in a two-masted yawl with red sails bought for Jung by his wife, and we see the two of them from above, lying in the boat, their bodies intertwined in a perfect double-S; it is the most beautiful and emotional shot in the film.

Viggo Mortensen, a frequent Cronenberg collaborator, was an unlikely choice for the role of Freud (at least that was what I thought going in). But he turns in a terrific performance, witty and intelligent—a carefully constructed character study. Freud is contained in his own theories, and chewing on his ubiquitous cigar inevitably brings up questions of his own oral fixations. He is indulgent of Jung's flights of fancy, at first, but eventually, as psychoanalysis becomes more accepted, he becomes concerned that Jung's mysticism will throw everyone off the rails. This Freud has some bite. I was so taken with Mortensen's constantly alert and cunning eyes. He was always thinking, sometimes on a current that flows in opposite direction of his dialogue. It is a very effective performance, and Mortensen, one of the best actors working today, has shown us something new in his repertoire. It bodes well for his life as a middle-aged actor.

Michael Fassbender is cinema's current It-boy, with his gloriously erotic and tormented performance as Mr. Rochester in this year's Jane Eyre, not to mention his superhero-in-training Magneto in this summer's X-Men: First Class. Shame, his second collaboration with director Steve McQueen (the first being the harrowing Hunger, about the Irish hunger strike in 1981, in which Fassbender played Bobby Sands) is also screening at the New York Film Festival.

Fassbender wears the period of A Dangerous Method easily. The glasses, the mustache, the waistcoat ... all suit him. On a visit to Freud's house, Carl Jung holds up the maid by his place at the table, so he can take enough food to feed 10 men. These men, coldly analytical in many ways, men of science, were also clearly men of great appetite.

But they were not pathologized for it to the degree that women were, and that was a disconnect in the film that could have been explored more deeply. It's common knowledge that "uterus" and "hysteria" are closely linked etymologically (often meaning one and the same thing, therefore "hysterectomy", etc.). Hysteria could be seen as a completely logical response to being a woman in a sexist society, the rigid controlling of their bodies, their fears of sex not being something neurotic but a valid reaction to not wanting to be pregnant for 50 percent of their lives. Jung and Freud, then, discussing things like penises, and orgasm, did so from a position of privilege and standing.

To understand and incorporate ravenous "appetite" into a buttoned-up world of convention and propriety was one of the goals of psychoanalysis. Our subconscious minds are filled with chaos and darkness. Jung and Freud tried to impose order.

Keira Knightley, as Sabine, also suffers from great hunger, and the violently jutting jaw and contorted limbs she shows in the earliest scenes are supposedly indicative of her illness. Knightley has never been better than in her awkward youth in Bend It Like Beckham, a part perfectly suited to her particular strengths as an actress. I never believe her in a corset and I never believe her in an apron or a bonnet. Knightley is obviously A-list, and gets a lot of great parts, but her acting craft is not up to the task of the parts she is given. Knightley, who did a lot of research into Sabine's particular malady, is clearly reaching for the brass ring in her portrayal of hysteria, but that's the problem. I see that strain; I see her reaching. While an actress trying to stretch and grow is admirable, Knightley is out of her depth here.

In the first scene, where we see her being dragged against her will into Jung's hospital, Knightley duly writhes and screams. But I couldn't help but think of another similar scene, from Norma Rae, when Sally Field is dragged out of the factory and forced into a police car. Director Martin Ritt gave Sally Field one piece of direction for that scene: "Do not let them put you in that car." Sally Field played that objective within an inch of her life. When Knightley protests, by contrast, she looks like she's acting.

The screenplay for A Dangerous Method wears its staginess openly in its commitment to long conversations between two characters. The screenplay itself is a "talking cure." Sex is serious, and a topic worthy of in-depth discussion, and the sense is palpably real in A Dangerous Method that old barriers were breaking down, allowing the formerly unsayable things to come pouring out. At one point, when Sabine is telling Jung one of her more horrifying dreams and how she felt when she woke up, Jung listens quietly. When she finishes, he asks her a simple question, "Were you masturbating?"

She was. The acknowledgement of the darkness of her desires, his casual acceptance that sex drive doesn't always play nice with societal norms, still feels like a revolution.

Our society continues to have trouble with the implications of the sex drive. Say what you will about psychoanalysis, either Freudian or Jungian, but it was a serious attempt to understand why we are the way we are. Although world events are rarely mentioned in A Dangerous Method, they are still accounted for in the film in an eerie way. As these two men hashed out their differences, discussing sex and death and dreams with one another, the Guns of August were already rolling into place. World War I would soon be unleashed upon the world.

Cronenberg directs A Dangerous Method with elegance and precision, highlighting the intellectual and sexual opposition between the three main characters. He is comfortable with long scenes where all that happens is two people talk to one another.

In today's cinema, sex is often treated in a juvenile and cruel-minded way, and seriousness about sex is scorned as either pretentious or unrealistic. A Dangerous Method is a welcome change. Let's talk about sex. It may cure us all.

http://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/film/lff-2011-a-dangerous-method

LFF 2011: A Dangerous Method
Reviews
The film itself is in a straitjacket - tightly-wound and emotionless.
Posted 26th October 2011, 4:10pm in Film, by Becky Reed


With the wealth of talent on display, it's extraordinary to report that A Dangerous Method is a disappointingly staid, flat film.

David Cronenberg, the director who can switch from visceral body horror to compelling drama in a heartbeat; Christopher Hampton, the screenwriter whose script for the complex Atonement was masterful; Viggo Mortensen, whose career post-Lord of the Rings has been electrifying in the hands of Cronenberg; Michael Fassbender, the intense and powerful actor du jour; Keira Knightley, the underrated, highly committed and inuitive actress who rarely makes a misstep.

Those names combined with the story of Carl Jung (Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud's (Mortensen) friendship, and the pivotal relationship between Jung and his patient Sabina Spielrein (Knightley) should make for riveting viewing. However, as the uninspiring trailer ominously indicated, there is little sense of drama or momentum.

Beginning with Jung's fledgling work in psychoanalysis, it kicks off with a crazed Sabina being treated for her hysterics under the care of Jung in 1904. Knightley gives a brave, vanity-free (and factually correct) portrayal of Sabina's physical transformations which is often extreme and uncomfortable to watch. When Sabina's guilty desires are pinpointed to spanking and humiliation, Jung uses her case as a basis for his work using 'the talking cure'. He approaches his mentor Freud with his results, with the film tackling their burgeoning friendship and opposing theories with a staggering lack of interest. Only Mortensen's dry wit keeps the spark alive.

Meanwhile, Jung oversteps his professional boundaries, and begins a blissful affair with the rapidly recovering Sabina, having all her BDSM fantasies fulfilled by a willing Jung and his cane. Knightley shines as the real star of this story, as she juggles the illicit relationship with her own dreams of studying medicine. Fassbender, so outstanding in many features this year, is merely competent with a direction that refuses to go any deeper than surface storytelling. Knightley's provocative passion sadly doesn't bounce off Fassbender's guilty Jung, with the actor having considerably more chemistry with the chaste Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre this year (that's if we're not counting James McAvoy in X-Men: First Class).

Vincent Cassell pops up as the lecherous, highly-sexed and bohemian Otto Gross, put into Jung's care at the request of Freud. Gross's theories inspire Jung, and also push him into his inevitable affair with Sabina. Canadian actress Sarah Gadon suffers by comparison to her stellar colleagues, as Jung's wealthy wife and constant bearer of his children. Mrs Jung's own work in psychiatry is barely mentioned.

Along with average production design and cinematography, Cronenberg's pacing is a chore, killing Hampton's deceptively clever script stone dead. It's as if the film itself is in a straitjacket, as tightly-wound and emotionless as it is. As the film's footnotes play, it becomes clear for all of Freud's cigar-chomping and Jung's pipe-smoking, that this was the extraordinary tale of the little-known Spielrein, and that Knightley has given her the depth she deserved.

Rating: 6/10

http://www.redbull.com/cs/Satellite/en_INT/Article/London-Film-Festival-2011--Dangerous-Method-review-021243110295011

Movie Blog: LFF 2011 | Dangerous Method and the Black Power Mix Tape | Popcorn Diaries
by Chris Sullivan, Oct 26, 2011

The London Film Festival is a feast for film fans but not every dish is to everyone's taste as Chris Sullivan discovers as he casts his critical eye over A Dangerous Method, W.E. and The Black Power Mix Tape.


A Dangerous Method

I had high hopes for director David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. It stars Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Keira Knightley as the former’s masochistic patient Sabina Spierein.

And all looked good until the opening scene when Miss Knightley, attempting to portray ‘nut job’, over eggs the pudding and ends up looking she’s in like a Monty Python sketch – gurning, thrusting her jaw out and clenching her fists like Stephen Hawking.

It’s all down hill from there for this lugubrious film, which is as about as exciting as watching paint dry. The script by Christopher Hampton (who also penned the appalling Atonement) is unfathomably bland and you could write the story on the back of a chewing gum wrapper.

In short, married Mr Jung meets an attractive nymphomaniac patient, shags and spanks her (even that's a bit of a waste of time as Knightley is about as sexy as a flannel), then he meets Freud and they talk psychoanalysis. He then dumps the girl and, for some reason, falls out with Freud. And that is it. I left the cinema wanting to bite someone.

http://www.thefilmpilgrim.com/reviews/a-dangerous-method-review/6663

A Dangerous Method Review
By
Frances Taylor
– October 24, 2011

Release Date (UK) – February 10th 2012
Certificate (UK) – TBC
Runtime – 99 minutes
Director – David Cronenberg
Country – Canada, Germany
Starring – Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen

In the early twentieth century, the field of psychoanalysis was surging forward. It’s pioneer, Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) broke the ground, and fellow Doctor Carl Jung (Fassbender) furthered his work in the talking method of psychiatric treatment, our “dangerous method” that the films title refers to. The film focuses on the friendship and professional rivalry between Freud and Jung, their methods, and patient Sabina Spielrein (Knightley). Sabina is admitted as a hysterical patient to Jung’s hospital. Jung is using the ‘talking method’ to treat her, which works to great success. Sabina discusses her past experiences and how they made her feel, proving some of Jung’s theories. He enrols her in a psychiatry course, and she follows in his medical footsteps, and the two form a close friend and mentor-ship.

In a drama about the pioneers of psychoanalysis, it would follow that A Dangerous Method contains a lot of feelings, a lot of repression, and a lot of analysis of others as well as the self. At the heart of the film is the idea of impulses, and whether it is right to give into them. Depending on which character you believe, giving into impulses could be the first step towards freedom, or towards being controlled by an undisciplined part of yourself. A Dangerous Method asks which is the better way to live, and whether the proper way to live in society is really the right one for the individual. It also stands as a cautionary tale about the price of conformity through repression.

The script starts out stronger than it ends. In the beginning of the film we have mental illness, sexual tension, an illicit affair, and the excitement that comes along with progression and discovering something new. The audience is learning about the characters learning about themselves and their profession. In the third act of the script, however, events seem to dribble out. Jung and Sabina stop seeing each other, Jung and Freud stop seeing each other, and everything stagnates. The ending is more an anti-climax than a denouement as nothing is resolved for the audience or the characters

A Dangerous Method BFI London Film Festival Review LFFFassbender gives a strong performance of Jung, looking genuinely torn up by his indecisiveness, and Mortensen is stoic and in control as the authoritative Freud. Knightley impresses most with her physical acting, especially in her face and exaggerated arm movements. She is certainly interesting, if not altogether convincing, as a hysterical mental patient, hysterical and sexually fixated on being humiliated. Sabina wis less interesting as a lover scorned though, and once she had been cured and her presence in the picture diminished, so does our overall interest. A cameo from Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross, hilariously named for he is deemed by Freud to be a sex addict, lightens the mood as he encourages Jung to “drink from the oasis” of Sabina, to surrender to his primal urges, and to really live life, before he escapes through the window of the hospital, never to be seen again or witness the consequences that his advice has.

A Dangerous Method is the least “Cronenberg-esque” of the Cronenberg films that I have seen. It fixates on the mind instead of the body, and there’s barely a hint of a psychological thriller in there. Due to the wealth of pre-existing material, fictional and non-fictional, A Dangerous Method doesn’t really break any new ground, and whilst the script doesn’t help it stand out, perhaps the fabled spanking scenes between Sabina and Jung will.

A Dangerous Method is showing at the BFI London Film Festival 2011

http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/2011/11/01/cronenberg-fassbender-hampton-analyze-a-dangerous-method/

Cronenberg, Fassbender, Hampton Analyze A Dangerous Method
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011 at 12:45pm

by Katie Calautti

Michael Fassbender in "A Dangerous Method"

Following a press screening of A Dangerous Method at the 49th New York Film Festival, screenwriter Christopher Hampton and star Michael Fassbender (who plays Carl Jung) were joined for a panel by director David Cronenberg in his first-ever appearance at the event.

The film’s somber subject matter — it centers on the relationship between Jung, his patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) and his colleague Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) during the early years of psychoanalysis – was matched by the mood of the room, where a mesmerized audience sat in awe of the legendary director. Cronenberg was quick to diffuse the atmosphere, peppering the discussion with his unlikley humor.

Asked if he feared it would be redundant to turn his camera on Freud and Jung after making so many films about sexual perversion, split personalities and the horror of the body, Cronenberg grinned. “That doesn’t sound like me to me!” he said. “I think that I’ve made a lot of comedies, actually.” The audience roared with laughter. “But I don’t really think about my other movies at all, frankly. When I decide to do something, I’m only interested in realizing that particular thing. I think when I read Christopher’s play – I’ve never seen it performed – I felt, in retrospect, that I had always wanted to do something about Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis. But to say that isn’t to say anything really because it’s such a vast topic and full of … incredible characters. When I saw Christopher’s play it was a fantastic structure that really beautifully distilled the essence of the era and that psychoanalytic movement into, primarily, five characters.”

For Hampton, the film’s realization had been a long road. “Well, it was first written in the mid- to late ’90s as a screenplay called Sabina for 20th Century Fox, and it floundered in the way that screenplays often do,” he recalled. “And it seemed too good of material to not take further. So I turned it into a stage play called The Talking Cure, which we did in London at the National Theatre with Ralph Fiennes. And then about a year or so later I had a call from Mr. Cronenberg, in which he said, ‘I think we might make a film.’ So it had a sort of circuitous progress but a happy ending, I think.”

David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen on the set of "A Dangerous Mind"

Fassbender went on to discuss how he became involved in the project. “We first met in Toronto. I flew up to have a lunch with David, and that’s really when he started to direct me. I always think great directors are great manipulators,” he continued, as Cronenberg shrugged dramatically. “And he was already planting scenes in my mind then at that lunch about … the story and what he found interesting about these various characters and where he thought Jung was coming from and his background.”

The actor was nothing but complimentary when it came to Cronenberg’s direction. “By the time we got on set, I think the one great thing – one of the many great things about David – is he allows you to sort of breathe within it in your own way,” Fassbender said. “It’s like, again, with great directors I find don’t necessarily give you a huge amount of direction on the day. It’s really a very sort of collaborative process and one that’s just very sort of free and he creates a very safe place to create and take risks and try things out. And I have to say it was a very humorous set … but everybody had done their homework and came ready to go to work and I think that’s what sort of already the respect that David has sort of demands that of his actors.”

When asked about the historical accuracy of the film, Cronenberg discussed the detail with which the team decided upon accents, and reiterated, “I have to say I think this movie is incredibly accurate in terms of the dialogue and all the historical details, because that was an era – as you can see from the movie – of great letter-writing, and these were very obsessive people, and so they recorded all their conversations and all their moments and all their dreams and analyzed them to death and so on. So we have huge documents, a ton of documents, to back up everything in the movie.”

Hampton also touched upon the relationships between Freud and Jung, as well as the women, in the film, saying, “Well, the men are far more childish, far less mature – nothing changes. I think in the end it was a mighty clash of egos between the men. One of the things you might say about that is one of the reasons we don’t know much about Sabina Spielrein is that her contribution to the history of psychoanalysis is really not recognized because the people she was talking to were busy claiming the high ground for themselves. So there is evidence – Freud, actually … Freud gave her a footnote about the death instinct, Jung – to whom she talked about archetypes … and all that kind of thing – I’m afraid to say never gave her any credit at all.”

So what of Knightley’s emotional and physical development of Spielrein, since she had so little to go on? “Well unbeknownst to me, Keira went to Christopher for advice … [mutters] screwed it all up,” Cronenberg laughed. “It took me ages to undo the damage!” Cronenberg and Hampton shared a good-natured chuckle.

“But he did give her a stack of books to read, as did I,” the director continued. “But beyond that we began with the first scenes, which were the hysteria scenes, and the hysteria was a disease that seems to … have been a kind of a product of that era and sort of the repression of women that was part of the culture. In fact the word hysteria comes from the Greek word that means uterus, and at times they would actually remove the uteruses of hysterical women thinking that that would cure them. So that gives you a bit of the context. However extreme it might seem at the beginning, what Keira does there, it’s actually very subdued compared with what Sabina Spielrein would have presented to Jung. And in fact Christopher’s mentioned that he’s actually seen the notes that Jung wrote on her admission detailing her symptoms, so we knew very well what the symptoms of her particular version of hysteria were.”

Ever the history teacher, Cronenberg described the archival footage he and the cast studied. “There’s actually film footage of hysterical patients at the turn of the century. And so all these strange paralyses and hysterical laughters and deforming of the body and twisting and tormenting your physical posture and so on – all of those are documented,” he explained. “It’s very difficult to watch, it makes you very uncomfortable…but we had to deliver the disease to the audience so that you would understand why she was completely disabled and she was dysfunctional and that’s why she was brought to this institute – because she couldn’t function.”

Fassbender with Keira Knightley in "A Dangerous Method"

Cronenberg and Knightley also arrived at an interesting conclusion when it came to where her tics should be centered. “We had to show how extreme it was and I felt that it should really be centered around her mouth because she is being asked by Jung – it is called ‘The Talking Cure’ – to say unspeakable things about herself, about her dreams, about her sexuality, about her masochism…things that you were not supposed to speak about,” he explained. “So the idea that she should be trying to speak – the words try to come out but another part of her tries to prevent those words from coming out, deform them so they’re not understandable, that’s how we did that. And then sort of gradually as she loses the hysteria and becomes more and more confident under Jung’s tutelage…you can see the evolution of the character.”

Knightley took the character and ran with it. “All the prep was pretty much done in these discussions. I mean, a lot of directing happened off the set – it happens when you’re choosing the clothes that you wear, it happens when you’re looking at the locations and by the time we got to the set Keira was there and…it was fantastic, I mean two takes and finished. …I had boarded the schedule to take in account how difficult it might be to develop Keira’s performance – I’d never worked with her before and this was very difficult stuff and it was sort of terrain that was new to her. And she was just so good and so right on that we were finished in no time.”

When asked what his hinge on this particular universe is, Cronenberg divulged, “For me, my hinge into the universe is that I really – as I think Freud did – insist on the reality of the human body. And Freud was insisting on it at a time when people were trying to deny that – the abstract ideas were everything Freud was talking about. Penises and vaginas and excrement and anuses and stuff that no one wanted to talk about or even acknowledge the existence of…he was saying a lot of those things have huge repercussions in our adult life, in our society and so on. …And if you ask me did I prefer Freud to Jung, well I feel more empathy for Freud’s approach to the human condition – I think Jung kind of represented ultimately a flight from the human body into spirituality and really religion, I think, ultimately. But I didn’t really feel the need to demolish him or favor Freud or anything like that.”

And what of an autobiographical quality to the film? “I don’t think it’s autobiographical other than that you know I mean Freud ended up being an old Jew and I’m headed that way,” joked Cronenberg. “So to that I say yes, total autobiographical. Beyond that it’s just really fascinating…an attempt to understand the human condition, which is really what art is all about. What is it to be human, what is society, what are we…and I think an artist and a psychoanalyst do very similar things. You’re presented with an official version of reality and then you say, ‘OK, that’s that but then what’s really going on – what’s going on underneath, what’s under the surface, what’s driving things, what are the hidden things?’ And that’s what a psychoanalyst does with his patient and that’s what an artist does with his society, I think, and his culture. So – to that extent – not exactly autobiographical but a kind of parallel process.”

A Dangerous Method opens on Nov 23.

youshouldreallywatch:
Movie Review: A Dangerous Method

I know I’ve promised reviews of a couple of other movies I’ve seen but I just watched A Dangerous Method and wanted to get my thoughts on it down pretty quickly.

Rating: 8/10

Oscar chances: Possible performance nominations for all three leads. (although Fassbender, from what I hear is more likely to get a nomination for Shame as he can only be nominated once per category unless he submits his name in the supporting actor category). Almost guarantee nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay as the dialogue was fantastic.

First off, all the performances in this film are amazing. They were all believable in their portrayals of their respective characters. As a huge Michael Fassbender fan I was not let down by his restrained performance as Carl Yung. I was most impressed by Viggo Mortensen, who’s role was smaller than I anticipated. He completely embodied the character. I give major props to the makeup artist for making Mortensen look completely unrecognizable.

I had heard conflicting reports on Keira Knightley’s performance. I have to say, that although her accent was awkward at times, her overall performance was very powerful. She did a great job of showing the simultaneous strength and fragility of Sabina Spielrein. She made a huge contribution to the field of psycho-analysis, and I appreciated that the film did not ignore that.

My one, somewhat major critique of the film was its pacing. The film spans many years and attempts to fit all of that time into an hour and 39 minutes. I would have preferred the film be a little bit longer and had more fluid transitions as opposed to being a succession of short scenes with huge leaps in time.

http://cinematiccorner.blogspot.com/2011/11/dangerous-method.html

11/11/2011
A Dangerous Method
56/100 (2011, 99 min)
Plot: A look at how the intense relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud gives birth to psychoanalysis.
Director: David Cronenberg
Writers: Christopher Hampton (screenplay), John Kerr (book)
Stars: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

Dangerous method? Empty outcome.

I was waiting so eagerly for "A Dangerous Method". But then I read this little piece of trivia which said that David Cronenberg told Keira Knightley that if she won't want to do any nudity, there will be none in the movie. Why would such a great director compromise his vision because of an actress? If it was a very talented actress, I could maybe understood his actions. But Keira Knightley, even if it was a great movie, would managed to ruin it with one of the worst performances I've seen in years.

I do not know what possessed Cronenberg to cast her. Is he on some charity mission where he takes actors from blockbusters and casts them in ambitious project? I see in his next movie he has Robert Pattinson in a lead role. Knightley is fine in romantic productions like "Never let me go", "Pride and Prejudice" and "Atonement", but despite her Academy Award nomination she really has not much of a talent. Her performance as Sabina Spielrein, Jung's disturbed patient is simply awful. Knightley's way of portraying her character involves trying to speak with bad Russian accent, uncontrollable yelling, hysterical crying and presenting what can only be described as annoying, fake mannerisms. I couldn't believe my eyes as I was watching her. You would think that as Sabina gets better, as the movie progresses, Knightley would be less annoying, but it's not the case. Everything about her - her voice, her bland expressions, her fidgeting is truly embarrassing to witness. I thought that Knightley was a decent actress until I saw this movie. For her own sake and especially for the sake of the movie goers, I truly hope she will stick to less ambitious material.
Another thing that fails miserably is the script and you really can't have a good movie without a decent script. Not only is the movie horribly boring - Cronenberg's previous film about mental illness "Spider" wasn't very engaging either, but at least it was a very clever, consistent story. Here everything is all over the place - we see Jung and his family, his interactions and lengthy conversations with Freud, his troubled relationship with Sabina, his talks with Otto Gross, who is really unnecessary in this movie - he appears as if from nowhere and then disappears. He is supposed to be a catalyst for Jung to begin his affair with Sabina, but things could have progressed just as well without his character in the movie. In the effect, the film which is only 90 minutes long, not only could have been much shorter, but it also manages to be extremely dull.

Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen are both wonderful actors, but they can both only do so much with the material given to them. Mortensen has created two wonderful performances in his two previous collaborations with Cronenberg in "A History of Violence" and "Eastern Promises". Here he is an eccentric Freud, but apart from bringing in a little humour to the movie, he doesn't have opportunity to do more than that. Fassbender is trying his best with terribly written character of Jung, but even he can't inject life in this picture. Cassel is always good, but he was type casted as sexual maniac again. Plus he is barely even in the movie.
Fassbender and Knightley have zero chemistry together - they relationship which was supposed to be both sexual and intellectual is neither of those things. Their sex scenes are completely devoid of eroticism - if that was supposed to be Cronenberg's attempt at showing sexuality from the analytic point of view, it failed as well - I had absolutely no interest in any of those characters or their studies and theories, because the movie has no core - it moves back and forth, never giving us enough to care about any of those people we are watching on screen.

What did work were the costumes and the music - Howard Shore did a good job with the score for the film, which prevents it from being completely forgettable. But still, it's nowhere near his work for "ExistenZ" which remains my favorite movie by Cronenberg. The editing is almost as disjointed as the script, but again when the plot is that chaotic, what can you do?

"A Dangerous Method" could have been thought-provoking, interesting movie, but the script prevented it from happening. And then casting of Knightley really made things worse. You won't learn much about Freud or Jung from this movie, you will not have any performances to marvel at. It's a lifeless, uninspired creation instead of being a fascinating, dangerous look inside great and disturbed minds.

http://www.backstage.com/bso/content_display/news-and-features/e3ie4055b0a02b97aec0793340f9d0440fb

Casting Standout: 'A Dangerous Method'
By Simi Horwitz

November 16, 2011

Photo by Sony PIctures Classics
Toronto-based casting director Deirdre Bowen—who has worked with director David Cronenberg on "Eastern Promises," "A History of Violence," and the upcoming "Cosmopolis"—is well-versed in his thoughtful and collaborative approach to casting. So when she, Cronenberg, and producer Jeremy Thomas met to talk about casting "A Dangerous Method," they all came with ideas, according to Bowen. Because the film is based on the lives of historic figures—Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—a big challenge was finding actors who could at least physically suggest them. Though she had a degree of flexibility, as most people picture them as older men, "we have to believe the actors might grow to look like Jung and Freud as they aged," Bowen explains.

The actors also had to suggest keen intelligence. The audience must fully accept that this person is indeed Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and the actor playing Jung needed to embody "an alpha male who is hugely self-confident, wealthy, and fascinated with the world," Bowen says. Of course, equally important, she admits, was finding actors who appealed to the film's distributors.

Viggo Mortensen was a unanimous choice for Freud. The actor had worked with Cronenberg on "A History of Violence" and "Eastern Promises," and though Freud was a different kind of role for him, there was little doubt he could pull it off. And "Viggo loves a challenge," Bowen adds. Michael Fassbender was also a consensus choice to play Jung, thanks to the actor's impressive body of work ("Inglourious Basterds," "Jane Eyre") and, most important, she says, his "tour de force performance in 'Hunger,' " in which he played Irish Republican Army activist Bobby Sands.

Though Keira Knightley also plays a real-life figure, few outside psychoanalytic circles have heard of Sabina Spielrein, and even fewer know what she looked like, so there was some freedom in casting the role, Bowen says. Nonetheless, the actor had to be beautiful and—because Spielrein ultimately became a major figure in psychoanalysis in her own right—convey both a piercing intelligence and "a deeply disturbed woman who is transformed as a result of psychoanalysis," Bowen says. "Keira was at the top of our list."

Vincent Cassel was another shoo-in, to play Freudian disciple and anarchist Otto Gross, according to the CD. The French actor had to bring to life a super-smart man with challenging ideas and loads of charm. The character shares some elements with the seductive and abusive director Cassel played in "Black Swan," Bowen says, but equally important, Cronenberg had directed him in "Eastern Promises," was familiar with his range, and had established that special bond and trust that comes from having collaborated.

Bowen is especially pleased with having brought in lesser-known Canadian actor Sarah Gadon to play Jung's wife. The CD was asked to find a Canadian actor—the film's funding was based on it—and had watched Gadon develop over the years. "I've seen her in smaller films and said to myself, 'The camera likes her,' " Bowen says. "She has a luminous beauty, and she's such a nice contrast to Keira. Sarah's character has the highest intelligence. She understands what's going on but keeps it to herself. She's strong and sweet. David liked her so much, he has cast her in his next film, 'Cosmopolis.' "

Many interesting smaller parts presented their own challenges. For one, the actors had to be believable as late-19th- or early-20th-century Germans. (All the smaller roles were cast in Germany, where the film was shot.) Photos of the period were a starting point. Another challenge was finding actors who could speak fluent English, "and we still had to figure out what we could get away with in terms of accents," Bowen says. "We needed actors to play patients who ranged in intelligence and economic class. Some were playing patients who were just troubled. Others were playing the downright crazy. We needed fine character actors who had strong character faces and who would be able to sustain the film and satisfy the needs of the producer and director. I know what David likes: intelligent actors who become his working partner. David is no Svengali."

Casting Director: Deirdre Bowen
Director: David Cronenberg
Writer: Christopher Hampton, based on his play "The Talking Cure," based on the book "A Most Dangerous Method" by John Kerr
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon
The Pitch: In Vienna on the cusp of World War I, the multilayered and beautiful Sabina Spielrein (Knightley) comes between novice psychiatrist Carl Jung (Fassbender) and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) while serving as inspiration to both.

http://www.fox40.com/entertainment/la-et-dangerous-method-20111123,0,7121717.story

'A Dangerous Method" review: Mortensen, Fassbender mesmerize
The complex relationship between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) is smartly played out in David Cronenberg's 'A Dangerous Method.'

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If Hampton's literate script provides the essential language, Mortensen and Fassbender do such a splendid job of turning iconic figures such as Freud and Jung into compelling people that it is a shock to hear that others (Christoph Waltz for Freud, Christian Bale for Jung) almost got the parts.
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These actors, along with costar Vincent Cassel, are strong enough to compensate for Knightley's weaknesses. She improves as the film goes on, but her performance lacks the substance to make us believe that her character is as crucial to both men's careers as history insists.

It's unfortunate that "Dangerous Method" begins with Knightley's least convincing moments, her arrival in 1904 at Jung's Burgholzli clinic in Zurich as the 18-year-old Spielrein, screaming, ranting and in the throes of complete hysteria. Knightley certainly throws herself into these scenes, but what we see comes off as an actress acting crazy rather than a character going mad.

The buttoned-down Jung tells his wealthy and proper wife Emma (Canadian actress Sarah Gadon) that Spielrein might be a good candidate for this new talking method of Freud's he's been reading about.

Under Jung's care, Spielrein's quite severe problems emerge: beatings by her father lead to sexual arousal, making her feel "there is no help for me, I am vile and filthy and corrupt." But also coming into focus is the woman's intelligence, insight and desire to be a physician, even a psychiatrist.

Jung's continued interest in Freud's methods lead to one of the film's high points, their 1906 meeting in Vienna. The two men have so much to say to each other that that initial encounter turns into a 13-hour conversation.

In this meeting, and in the film as a whole, it helps that Cronenberg has cast both Jung and Freud slightly against type. It's fascinating to see the exceptionally charismatic Fassbender squeeze himself into the role of the aristocratic, restrained Jung, and it's just as enjoyable to see Mortensen bring an unexpected virility to his sybaritic, cigar-chomping Freud.

With psychiatric practice in its infancy, neither man is sure what will happen next. "I've set my feet on the shore and the country exists," is all Freud is prepared to say with confidence, but he does initially see Jung as his likeliest crown prince and heir.

What neither man expects is that once Jung returns to Zurich, Spielrein, hungry for experience, will want to begin a sexual relationship with him, which he as her doctor initially rejects. Then a new patient, the wealthy Otto Gross, sent to Burgholzli by Freud, enters the picture.

Seductively played by French actor Cassel, Gross is an immensely charming, cocaine-sniffing social nihilist whose motto is "never repress anything." A man who believes "pleasure is simple until we decide to complicate it," he influences Jung's thoughts about Spielrein, and that in turn creates problems in Jung's increasingly complex relationship with Freud.

Though its conventional surface makes this not the norm for director Cronenberg, whose credits include "Naked Lunch," based on the William S. Burroughs novel, and 1996's J.G. Ballard adaptation "Crash," the film's fascination with the creative and destructive force of sexuality means that "A Dangerous Method" is a good fit for him thematically.

When a director who perennially goes for broke decides to exercise restraint on screen, as Cronenberg did with one of his previous collaborations with Mortensen, the compelling "A History of Violence," the results are invariably worth the effort.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

http://www.movieline.com/2011/11/review-a-dangerous-method.php

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Review || by Stephanie Zacharek || 11 22 2011 1:40 PM
REVIEW: Fassbender and Mortensen Duke It Out, Amicably, in A Dangerous Method
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Movieline Score: 8 Leader image for REVIEW: Fassbender and Mortensen Duke It Out, Amicably, in A Dangerous Method

David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method is probably the most fun you’ll ever have watching a movie about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud duking it out — and nurturing a deep-rooted but fragile friendship — in early 20th century Austria and Switzerland. In fact, when I first saw Viggo Mortensen done up in his trim little Freud beard, I nearly laughed out loud — not because he looked ridiculous, but because he looked so right. Mortensen has become one of Cronenberg’s go-to guys in recent years, and you can see why: Even in a period film like this one — a picture that runs the heavy risk of being ponderous and stiff — he can slip himself into the scenery with a “Don’t mind me, here in my Sigmund Freud getup” naturalness.

That’s not true of everyone in the picture, particularly Keira Knightley, who has to navigate a particularly difficult entrance: Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian woman who would go on to become a renowned psychoanalyst herself, but when we first see her, she’s a hysterical creature being carted off to a hospital, kicking and screaming, in a horse-drawn carriage. Michael Fassbender’s Jung is the doctor in charge of treating her, and she’s in the midst of a fit when he first sits her down: Her neck is drawn long and tight, her eyes pop, her jaw juts out so far it looks as if it might detach from her face. It’s a lot of acting — maybe not good acting — but it sure gets the point across.

Knightley gets better scene by scene, and the movie does too: Cronenberg is working from a script by Christopher Hampton (the movie is based on his play, The Talking Cure, as well as on John Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method), and his control over the material is both masterful and confident in its lightness. The picture is handsome — it was shot by Peter Suschitzky — but not stately in the deadly way. Turn-of-the-century Vienna looks like a happening place here, bustling with horse-drawn carriages and men and ladies walking briskly in, respectively, their dark homburgs and fluted skirts. Somehow, Suschitzky makes it look alive and not like a 3-D souvenir postcard.

In short, Cronenberg has made an elegant film, with spanking.

In short, Cronenberg has made an elegant film, with spanking. There’s some mildly kinky sex in A Dangerous Method, but Cronenberg makes it neither exploitive nor so tasteful that it loses its charge. He’s hip to the allure of the forbidden, but he doesn’t get carried away by it, nor does he assess any judgment — kind of like your therapist, come to think of it. (One of the movie’s jauntiest sections involves Jung’s “treatment” of Dr. Otto Gross, a hedonist sex maniac played by a terrifically scruffy Vincent Cassel.)

Nor does Cronenberg make the mistake of thinking he’s writing a term paper. He’s a skilled and astute filmmaker, but he has an unfortunate tendency to take himself too seriously. His disciplined offhandedness is key here, and his actors thrive in the atmosphere he’s created for them. Fassbender has the great gift of being able to forget how good-looking he is: His Jung is gentlemanly, thoughtful, dutiful, as upstanding as the starched white collar he wears. It all goes kerflooey when he’s tempted by forbidden fruit, and Fassbender works that transition beautifully: His facial features are so classically composed — he looks so preternaturally stable and trustworthy — that when you see him play a character torn between intellect and the sexual impulse, you understand the costs involved. Through the course of the movie Knightley, as the woman who most challenges Jung both in and out of the bedroom — he clearly doesn’t get the same kick in the pants from his aristocratic wife, played very prettily by Sarah Gadon — turns her stilted, phony-Russian diction from a liability to a strength. By the end, she’s believable as a woman whose intelligence is inextricably bound with her awkwardness: Her Sabina Spielrein is never quite at home in the world, which gives her a better perch from which to observe it.

But the exchanges between Fassbender’s Jung and Mortensen’s Freud are the movie’s greatest pleasures. Fassbender is the straight man to Mortensen’s sly jokester. At their first meeting, Freud listens patiently as Jung outlines Spielrein’s symptoms in great detail. He offers one observation, which Jung rejects; he offers another that Jung also pooh-poohs. “Well,” he says, after waiting one patient beat, “perhaps it’s a Russian thing.” In A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg takes this meeting of minds and finds the crackle in the connection. It’s never dull for a moment, which is an achievement for a movie about two guys who built whole therapeutic disciplines around the acts of talking and listening. Cronenberg is attuned to the inherent drama, and the pitfalls, in what these men did. As a filmmaker, he’s as good a listener as he is a talker.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/movies/a-dangerous-method-by-david-cronenberg-review.html?ref=movies

Movie Review
A Dangerous Method (2011)
NYT Critics' Pick

David Cronenberg's 'Method': David Cronenberg, the director of “A Dangerous Method,” discusses his film about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Taming Unruly Desires and Invisible Monsters
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: November 22, 2011

“A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s new film, starts out with a case of hysteria. A woman, clumsily restrained by nondescript handlers, writhes and howls inside a horse-drawn carriage, her mania at once drowned out and underscored by the thunder of hooves and the shrieking of strings on the soundtrack.

We learn soon enough that she is Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a disturbed young Russian en route to a clinic in Zurich some time in the early 20th century. But at the moment, she seems more like a wild animal. This abrupt and rather frightening introduction — the viewer is pitched headlong not only into Sabina’s company but also into her condition — is an emphatic announcement of some of the film’s intentions.

The subject of its analysis — a deceptively dry clinical term that is not out of place in reference to this subtle and intellectually thrilling true story — is the way unruly desires and emotions struggle with efforts to tame and confine them.

The startling violence of Sabina’s disorder, which turns her, even in moments of relative calm, into a twisted, sputtering wreck, is also a signal that, appearances to the contrary, “A Dangerous Method” (based on a play by the film’s screenwriter, Christopher Hampton, that was drawn from a book by John Kerr) is not just another decorous Oscar-season costume party. The rigor and repression on display here are hardly the quaint artifacts of a bygone social order, which we in the audience can congratulate ourselves on having left behind. What we are witnessing, rather, is the raw, liberating and terrifying emergence of a distinctly modern way of understanding, and trying to assuage, some of the pain and intensity of being alive.

Sabina is treated in Zurich by Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), who calls the nascent method for dealing with problems like hers “psychanalysis.” Jung’s mentor in Vienna corrects him — he says it sounds more “logical” with the “o” in the middle — and since the mentor in question is none other than Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), the younger man defers, at least on matters of pronunciation, and at least for a while.

Hopscotching through a series of episodes from 1907 up to the eve of World War I, “A Dangerous Method” traces the shifting relationships among its principal characters. Sabina is Jung’s patient, his lover and finally a colleague. At the same time Freud and Jung act out a complicated Oedipal drama, as the younger analyst evolves from promising disciple into Freud’s heir apparent and then a dangerous rebel, whose mystical interests fly in the face of psychoanalytic orthodoxy.

Sabina, emotionally connected to Jung (who remains guiltily devoted to his aristocratic wife, Emma, played by Sarah Gadon), finds more intellectual affinity with Freud, who reminds her at one point that, unlike Jung, they are both Jews. (This is of course perfectly true, but in the context of the movie, the observation is a bit surreal. Viggo? Keira? Who knew!)

“A Dangerous Method” is full of ideas about sexuality — some quite provocative, even a century after their first articulation — but it also recognizes and communicates the erotic power of ideas. There are scenes of kinky activity between Sabina and Jung that will no doubt enjoy long life in specialized corners of the Internet, but the most unsettling aspect of “A Dangerous Method” may be the links it suggests between sex and thinking. The mind is both slave and master of the body’s appetites, and the absurd and terrifying task of stabilizing that dynamic, in theory and in practice, is embraced equally by the film and the fragile, serious historical figures who inhabit it.

The technique Jung adopts with Sabina, even before traveling to Austria to meet Freud, is the talking cure. She sits with her back to him and recalls traumatic episodes from her childhood, while he takes notes and asks questions. This kind of scene is familiar enough — from Woody Allen and “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “The Sopranos,” and maybe from real life as well — that seeing a primitive incarnation is at once droll and curiously exciting. It is also marvelous to see Freud, that embattled colossus, restored to his human dimensions by Mr. Mortensen. His sly performance is so convincingly full of humor, warmth and vanity that it renders moot just about every other posthumous representation of the patriarch of psychoanalysis.

In various combinations and in shifting roles, Sabina, Jung and Freud are engaged in an expedition into the uncharted territory of the unconscious. Jung and his patient, in particular, do so with a sense of novelty and risk. The feeling of stepping into terra incognita makes “A Dangerous Method” something of an adventure story. It also at times has the quiet, uncanny mood of a horror movie, albeit one whose monsters are invisible, living inside the souls they menace.

Mr. Cronenberg is, of course, one of the great living practitioners of the horror genre, with a history of bringing fears both primal and contemporary — about sex, dreams, technology, the media, the grossness of the body — to vivid, shocking and grotesquely funny cinematic life. After the brilliant and nightmarish creepshows of the ’80s (including “Scanners,” “Videodrome,” “Dead Ringers” and “The Fly”), he has recently worked in a more classical and at least superficially less extreme mode. Given its long stretches of earnest and erudite scientific talk, “A Dangerous Method” might seem to be his calmest and most cerebral film yet.

It is and it isn’t. The ambient quiet allows you to pick up tremors of deep dread, and Mr. Cronenberg’s fastidious and elegant compositions hum with the latent possibility of chaos and destruction. Jung, with his neatly trimmed mustache and his studious Protestant politesse, seems to embody an ideal of upright Germanic propriety. He is serious, attentive and curiously passive, becoming aware of his own feelings only when other people point them out to him.

One of these is Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a fellow analyst, sent to Jung by Freud, who turns out to be a feral and charming emanation of pure id, an imp of the Freudian perverse. Otto does not just sleep with his patients; he also takes the flouting of ethical norms as a therapeutic and moral necessity. He manages, through a blend of rhetorical flim-flam and Byronic charisma, to argue the fastidious Jung into bed with Sabina (though she is the one who makes the first move).

She and Otto represent both the lawlessness of the Freudian unconscious — the disruptive force of untamed libido — and what might be called a Cronenbergian principle of uncontrollability. Ms. Knightley’s performance might at first seem grotesque and overdone. She twists her arms together and extends her lower jaw like a demented snapping turtle, stammering (in a thick Russian accent) and making her already prominent eyes pop out of her skull. But what looks like willful freakishness is crucial to the film’s logic, which depends partly on the contrast between Sabina’s hysteria and the respectable reserve of Carl and Emma’s domestic life, and partly on Sabina’s growing ability to understand and express herself.

Ms. Knightley’s facial expressions and bodily contortions seem deliberately drawn from the 19th-century iconography of hysteria. But if she is a revenant from an age before Prozac, Sabina is also an uncannily modern spirit, whose torments are as recognizable as her symptoms are outlandish. And Jung, as he gropes after ultimate meanings and obscure symbols, is surely one of us, an ambivalent inhabitant of the country Freud discovered. “A Dangerous Method” is so strange and unnerving precisely because the world it depicts is, for better and for worse, the only one we know.

“A Dangerous Method” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Eros and Thanatos.

A DANGEROUS METHOD

Opens on Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by David Cronenberg; written by Christopher Hampton, based on his stage play “The Talking Cure” and the book “A Most Dangerous Method,” by John Kerr; director of photography, Peter Suschitzky; edited by Ronald Sanders; music by Howard Shore; production design by James McAteer; costumes by Denise Cronenberg; produced by Jeremy Thomas; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes.

WITH: Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein), Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud), Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Sarah Gadon (Emma Jung) and Vincent Cassel (Otto Gross).

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/a-dangerous-method-20111121

A Dangerous Method
Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender
Directed by David Cronenberg

By Peter Travers
November 21, 2011

In this erotic mind-bender from director David Cronenberg, talk isn't cheap, it's what helped birth modern psychiatry at the start of the 20th century. Swiss therapist Carl Jung (an outstandingly good Michael Fassbender) is giving the "talking cure" to Russian Jew Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a howling sexual hysteric with an itch to shrink heads herself and get the married Jung to spank her, for starters. This goes against the belief of Jung's Viennese mentor, Sigmund Freud (a purring Viggo Mortensen has a high old time playing a man who likes to have the last word). Screenwriter Christopher Hampton sets up a duel between the men with Spielrein as prime instigator. Leave it to Cronenberg to make the cerebral sizzle. On a ship heading to New York, Freud asks Jung, "Do you think they know we're on our way, bringing them the plague?" Talk among yourselves. The actors give it their all, especially Knightley, whose jaw- jutting, heavily accented and unfairly criticized portrayal gives the film its fighting spirit.

http://www.sidereel.com/posts/196089-news-a-dangerous-method-sidereel-review

A Dangerous Method - SideReel Review
by eliseo | 15:51 EST, 22 Nov, 2011

A Dangerous Method

David Cronenberg making a film about the birth of diagnosing psychosexual dysfunction is as good a pairing of director and subject as anyone could possibly conceive. Unexpectedly, the Canadian auteur's A Dangerous Method deals with the uneasy friendship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) in purely psychological terms, mostly downplaying the physical expressions of their particular hang-ups.

The movie opens with Jung meeting a new patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who seeks help for her seemingly uncontrollable need to have sex when she's humiliated. Jung has read about groundbreaking work being done by Sigmund Freud, and he decides Spielrein would be the ideal patient for him to first attempt to use Freud's new "talking" cure. Their sessions turn out to be fruitful for Spielrein and lead Jung to contact Freud, and soon the men develop a friendly, collegial relationship. However, their mutual admiration is broken when Jung becomes attracted to Spielrein and crosses an ethical line that Freud finds unacceptable. Complicating matters further, Spielrein becomes a savvy therapist in her own right.

The performances are uniformly strong. Fassbender is thoroughly engaging and sympathetic as Jung; it's hard to share Freud's growing disgust with his protege, because Fassbender gives Jung such a strong desire to do the right thing. He wants to help people, and his few personal dalliances feel like the actions of a man who understands he needs to indulge certain peccadilloes in order to help others: Why not spank a willing masochist if it'll help her and you get on with the job at hand? Mortensen delivers yet again for Cronenberg and makes Freud a towering figure, imposing and always confident that he's better than Jung -- a belief that's bitterly ironic when, just before the closing credits roll, we find out where these two men ended up.

The duo are ably supported by Knightley, who is better once she can shed the facial tics her character suffers from in the movie’s opening scenes, and the always earthy Vincent Cassel as Otto, an unapologetic hedonist whom Freud asks Jung to treat.

Kinky sex and mental instability have been recurring themes for Cronenberg for years, but the sex in his films is very rarely sensual and always an expression of his characters' darkest impulses. Think back to the twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers or James Spader's role in Cronenberg’s adaptation of the novel Crash for just two examples. A Dangerous Method puts a unique spin on this by featuring characters who are fully aware of why they have the kinks they do. This self-knowledge doesn't stop them from acting on their impulses, but it does make them feel an acute guilt that's usually absent from Cronenberg's movies.

It's such a mature, talky film that people might feel let down that Cronenberg didn't run with the more outlandish aspects of this true story, but what makes A Dangerous Method unique among his movies is its examination of self-examination. Jung isn't overcome with remorse for his actions; he understands that his kinks are a part of him, albeit a part that he knows must be controlled though certainly not eliminated. This cerebral approach may leave some viewers cold, since for all of the amazing events that transpire during the course of the film, there really isn't much of a character arc for Jung -- he gets smarter, but he doesn't change. But for those who appreciate seeing Cronenberg continue to evolve, to turn what is usually the subtext of his films into the actual text, A Dangerous Method becomes a singular entry in the master's remarkable career.



-Perry Seibert

http://www.sunherald.com/2011/11/22/3591846/a-dangerous-method.html

Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011
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'A Dangerous Method'
By KENNETH TURAN - Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES -- Before it became known as psychoanalysis, the radical new method of dealing with emotional crises pioneered by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and others was known simply as "the talking cure." And it is talk - smart, satisfying and sometimes even thrilling - that is at the heart of "A Dangerous Method."

"Method" stars Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung, and a game but somewhat miscast Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a woman who influenced them both. The confident directing style of David Cronenberg is essential in making this kind of intellectually stimulating cinema look easy, but the critical component in the film's success is Christopher Hampton's classically well-written script.

Hampton's credits (including his Oscar-winning "Dangerous Liaisons," "Atonement" and the Michael Caine-starrer "The Quiet American") are for the most part adaptations, and here he is working from both his own play on the subject (called "The Talking Cure") and John Kerr's "A Most Dangerous Method," a comprehensive history of this three-way relationship.

If Hampton's literate script provides the essential language, Mortensen and Fassbender do such a splendid job of turning iconic figures such as Freud and Jung into compelling people that it is a shock to hear that others (Christoph Waltz for Freud, Christian Bale for Jung) almost got the parts.

These actors, along with co-star Vincent Cassel, are strong enough to compensate for Knightley's weaknesses. She improves as the film goes on, but her performance lacks the substance to make us believe that her character is as crucial to both men's careers as history insists.

It's unfortunate that "Dangerous Method" begins with Knightley's least convincing moments, her arrival in 1904 at Jung's Burgholzli clinic in Zurich as the 18-year-old Spielrein, screaming, ranting and in the throes of complete hysteria. Knightley certainly throws herself into these scenes, but what we see comes off as an actress acting crazy rather than a character going mad.

The buttoned-down Jung tells his wealthy and proper wife, Emma (Canadian actress Sarah Gadon), that Spielrein might be a good candidate for this new talking method of Freud's he's been reading about.

Under Jung's care, Spielrein's quite severe problems emerge: beatings by her father lead to sexual arousal, making her feel "there is no help for me, I am vile and filthy and corrupt." But also coming into focus is the woman's intelligence, insight and desire to be a physician, even a psychiatrist.

Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2011
0 Comments
'A Dangerous Method'
By KENNETH TURAN - Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES -- Jung's continued interest in Freud's methods lead to one of the film's high points, their 1906 meeting in Vienna. The two men have so much to say to each other that that initial encounter turns into a 13-hour conversation.

In this meeting, and in the film as a whole, it helps that Cronenberg has cast both Jung and Freud slightly against type. It's fascinating to see the exceptionally charismatic Fassbender squeeze himself into the role of the aristocratic, restrained Jung, and it's just as enjoyable to see Mortensen bring an unexpected virility to his sybaritic, cigar-chomping Freud.

With psychiatric practice in its infancy, neither man is sure what will happen next. "I've set my feet on the shore and the country exists," is all Freud is prepared to say with confidence, but he does initially see Jung as his likeliest crown prince and heir.

What neither man expects is that once Jung returns to Zurich, Spielrein, hungry for experience, will want to begin a sexual relationship with him, which he as her doctor initially rejects. Then a new patient, the wealthy Otto Gross, sent to Burgholzli by Freud, enters the picture.

Seductively played by French actor Cassel, Gross is an immensely charming, cocaine-sniffing social nihilist whose motto is "never repress anything." A man who believes "pleasure is simple until we decide to complicate it," he influences Jung's thoughts about Spielrein, and that in turn creates problems in Jung's increasingly complex relationship with Freud.

Though its conventional surface makes this not the norm for director Cronenberg, whose credits include "Naked Lunch," based on the William S. Burroughs novel, and 1996's J.G. Ballard adaptation "Crash," the film's fascination with the creative and destructive force of sexuality means that "A Dangerous Method" is a good fit for him thematically.

When a director who perennially goes for broke decides to exercise restraint on screen, as Cronenberg did with one of his previous collaborations with Mortensen, the compelling "A History of Violence," the results are invariably worth the effort.

Kenneth Turan: kenneth.turan@latimes.com

A DANGEROUS METHOD

MPAA rating: R for sexual content and brief language

Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Playing: In limited release

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/reviews/story/2011-11-22/a-dangerous-method/51353534/1?csp=34life&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+UsatodaycomMovies-TopStories+%28Life+-+Movies+-+Top+Stories%29

David Cronenberg's 'Method' a little short on danger
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
Updated 2h 25m ago

A Dangerous Method has plenty to say about sex, but it lacks much fire for it.

Keira Knightley, left, as Sabina Spielrein and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, star in the new film 'A Dangerous Method.'

Liam Daniel, GANNETT

Keira Knightley, left, as Sabina Spielrein and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, star in the new film 'A Dangerous Method.'

Enlarge

Liam Daniel, GANNETT

Keira Knightley, left, as Sabina Spielrein and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, star in the new film 'A Dangerous Method.'
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That may be the point of David Cronenberg's restrained look at the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as the woman who drove them apart. The film is well-acted and tightly written. But given its subject matter, Method could use a dollop of heat.

Method, based on John Kerr's 1994 book A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, examines how far the men pushed boundaries in the nascent days of psychoanalysis. What the film doesn't do is push many boundaries itself.

PHOTOS: A look at holiday movie season

Set in 1904 Zurich, Method introduces us to the hysterical Spielrein (Keira Knightley), whose sexual abuse and humiliation leave the young Russian woman a hollering mess. Knightley is solid, though her character can be so over the top that she comes off as shrill, particularly at the beginning.

Michael Fassbender plays Jung, a fastidious doctor who initially reveres Freud before turning to Eastern philosophy and astrology as part of his practice. Fassbender is terrific: Wire-rimmed and lantern-jawed, Jung is wound so tightly you expect him to be the one in hysterics.
About the movie

A Dangerous Method
** 1/2 out of four

Stars: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel
Director: David Cronenberg
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Rating: R for sexual content and brief language
Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Opens in New York and Los Angeles Wednesday, nationwide Dec. 2

As Freud, Viggo Mortensen also is convincing. He has always been a chameleon actor and bears no resemblance to his dashing heroes from Lord of the Rings or Hidalgo. He has been aged well and largely muted here. If anything, Mortensen may be too restrained. Like Jung, Freud seems so high-strung it's a wonder the two made it as shrinks.

But only Knightley gets to chew scenery. Cronenberg's distance worked in A History of Violence, where the offenses were so brutal that audiences needed a buffer from the bloodshed.

But even with Knightley's beauty and her doctors' probing questions, Method lacks a certain heart. One scene, in which Jung takes a strap to Spielrein, might have sparked a "How dare he?" or "Here we go" in another movie. Here, it's "Oh, he's spanking her."

The clinical view doesn't undo Method, which likely will be remembered for its acting performances by awards voters. And as a biographical film, Method gives real insight into its subjects, especially Jung.

But as both real-life doctors might have advised, there's nothing wrong with exercising a little passion.

http://www.irishcentral.com/ent/Michael-Fassbender-is-a-leading-man---A-Dangerous-Method-reviewed---VIDEO-134453933.html

Michael Fassbender is a leading man - ‘A Dangerous Method’ reviewed - VIDEO
2012 is looking like the year in which he achieves complete global dominance
By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY,
Irish Voice Arts Editor

Published Thursday, November 24, 2011, 9:21 AM
Updated Thursday, November 24, 2011, 12:29 PM

Michael Fassbender, the 34-year-old Irish actor, is having a banner year. Cast in several of the biggest critical hits of 2011 and this year’s winner of the prestigious Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival, he’s already become one of the world’s great leading men.

But 2012 is looking like the year in which he achieves complete global dominance, and his fans couldn’t be happier about it. Fassbender is that rare thing after all, a combination of brooding good looks and a genuinely once in a generation acting talent.

In A Dangerous Method, the absorbing new David Cronenberg film opening this Friday about a bitter conflict between two of the titans of the 20th century, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, Fassbender stars in a dark tale of sexual and intellectual discovery that’s based on true-life events.


When fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung (Fassbender) and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) encounter the troubled young Russian woman Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), the beautiful young woman quickly comes between them. Into this already combustible mix comes Otto Gross, a debauched and amoral young patient who appears to have no sexual or social boundaries at all.

A Dangerous Method (the title refers to the act of psychoanalysis itself, which was considered dangerous by Sigmund Freud’s critics) is based on Academy Award winning writer Christopher Hampton’s original play, The Talking Cure. Hampton already has two classic screenplays like Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement under his belt, so his script for the new film is as absorbing as you’d expect.

Fassbender in particular is a revelation in a performance that simply outshines every other actor on the screen. It’s because he’s in possession of that all too rare gift -- the ability to completely convince you he actually is the character he’s playing.

He’s so good, in fact, that he carries this brooding, anxios and overlong film on his own back all the way to the closing title.

Which is not to say that A Dangerous Method is a dull film. In fact it’s central ideas are completely fascinating, and it has interesting and provocative things to say about marriage, sexuality, love and commitment (which are all evergreen subjects, after all).

But it’s the way that we get to these interesting discussions that rankles a bit. First of all there’s the musical score by Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore.

With its orchestral strings blaring out from the opening shot, it seems to be telegraphing to us that this is a classy, serious film. Unfortunately the music contrasts sharply with the at times quite unhinged performance of Knightley, who early on looks mostly bewildered and bewilderingly miscast.

Knightley elongates her jaw impressively in the opening scenes to indicate she’s having serious mental problems, but she’s so absurdly pretty -- even in extreme situations -- that you already know things are going to work out for her eventually.

Even when she takes an unscheduled dip in the sanatorium pool, she manages never to let the mud cover her gorgeous auburn tresses. It’s as if, mad and all as she is, she was smart enough to hire a stylist and a costume designer to ensure she never looks too loopy.

Knightley can act, but she’s out of her depth as the curiously seductive young Russian Jew the script needs her to be. It’s only when Fassbender appears that the film achieves a genuine dramatic intensity, and it’s all thanks to his remarkable skill as an actor.

In the film Fassbender plays Jung just as he’s starting out on his world changing career and making use of Freud’s experimental treatment known as psychoanalysis, or the talking cure. Early on he meets 18-year-old Sabina Spielrein, who has been diagnosed with hysteria and is given to violent fits and outbursts.

You can see what’s coming a mile off, but the film slowly reveals that Spielrein has been abused by her authoritarian father, who subjected her to repeated beatings and humiliations during her childhood. The connection between emotional disorders and sexuality confirm Freud’s theories and make an early convert out of Jung when it comes to his method.

That discovery leads to a friendship forming between Jung and Freud, who begins to see the young man as his intellectual heir.

But then another charismatic young patient enters Jung’s life in the form of Otto Gross, a drug addict who is committed to his own sexual gratification. He skillfully argues against Jung’s commitment to monogamy, pushing the boundaries and ethics of the man who is supposed to be curing him.

It’s a remarkable sequence, and Fassbender is superb as he struggles with his professional commitments, his marriage and his basic and longstanding desire to make love to Spielrein.

Eventually he pushes aside his qualms and begins a heady affair with his former -- but now cured -- patient. It’s a move that violates the doctor/patient relationship, and it leads to an ethical clash between Jung and his far more patrician college Freud.

The fight between the two learned men, which hinges ultimately on Freud’s inability to ever allow his former student to become his colleague (his equal, in other words) eventually leads to a complete break between the two men, and a rupture in psychoanalysis that would endure for decades.

But oddly enough, it’s in the chemistry and the philosophical battles between Fassbender and Mortensen that A Dangerous Method really comes to life.

In their own time both men were conscious that their groundbreaking work would be profoundly influential, and they both wanted to guard its legacy and ensure it could continue. That passion led to a rigidity of mind in Freud that Jung rebelled against, over and over.

But Jung too had his blind spots. In the beginning he was bourgeois and conventional in his outlook, a product of his class and period, and he refused to acknowledge that some of the hostility to Freud’s talking cure method had its origins in hostility to Freud’s ethic background (the Nazis eventually drove him out of Europe).

The action of A Dangerous Method is taken directly between the correspondence between Jung, Freud and Spielrein and so it achieves its sense of authenticity directly from the source.

But Fassbender’s turn as the tortured and blazingly brilliant young Jung is the greatest part of the film. He plumbs the emotional core of his character in a way that surpasses his co-stars, and in the process he saves this slow moving but still quietly compelling film from becoming a biopic about a titan of the 20th century.

It’s not giving too much away to say that the ending is as bittersweet as we begin to anticipate early on. The collusion of personalities, theories, desires and broken hearts make it a dead cert almost from the beginning.

It’s Fassbender’s all-electric performance that will be remembered. He’s already the kind of actor that simply can’t fail.

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/02/143014334/for-fassbender-two-perspectives-on-the-perils-of-sex

For Fassbender, Two Perspectives On The Perils Of Sex

by David Edelstein
Listen to the Story

In Shame, Matthew Fassbender plays a sex-addicted New Yorker whose physical and psychological hungers drive him to the point of self-annihilation.

Shame

Director: Steve McQueen
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 101 minutes

NC-17; for explicit sexual content

With: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan and James Badge Dale
text size A A A
December 2, 2011

The Irish actor Michael Fassbender stars in two current films that revolve around the perils of sex — which means you see him have a lot, so he'll have something to regret.

You know how the sex will play out in Shame, because of, well, the title. Fassbender plays a sex addict, Brandon Sullivan, born in Ireland, raised in New Jersey, and he seems to work in advertising, which is unfortunate since he resembles Mad Men's Jon Hamm.

Brandon is not a predator — he's magnetic enough that his pickups are soft sells. But he prefers prostitutes and online chats: nothing involving emotional commitment. His one tie is to his sister, played by Carey Mulligan, a nightclub singer who sleeps around but, unlike her brother, gets too emotionally committed too fast. Each sibling embarrasses the other, but they're stuck together.

Shame has full-frontal nudity and a rare NC-17 rating, although the shots in question aren't necessary and make me think they're there so the director can say, "The actors are naked, I tell you. Emotionally and physically." His name is Steve McQueen — the British art-school graduate, not the late American actor, obviously — and he films his characters like specimens in a jar.

There are several excellent scenes, one wordless: Brandon stares at a woman on the subway, mentally undressing her, and she, after much hesitation, seems to mentally undress him back. I bet the actress, Lucy Walters, will get parts after this. The other great scene is early, when Brandon overhears his sister pleading on the phone with a lover not to leave. Mulligan hits startling notes as she sobs; her fear of separation is primal.
Fassbender's Carl Jung — Sigmund Freud's protege — struggles to reconcile theory and practice in A Dangerous Method.
Sony Pictures Classics

Fassbender's Carl Jung — Sigmund Freud's protege — struggles to reconcile theory and practice in A Dangerous Method.

A Dangerous Method

Director: David Cronenberg
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 99 minutes

Rated R; for sexual content and brief language

With: Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

But the film's trajectory is so obvious I found myself laughing, especially when Brandon flees a potential girlfriend and sinks to what is plainly depicted as a new low: He goes to a gay bar and lets an anonymous man ... "It's too tragic," the film seems to be saying. Then he has an orgy where's he's photographed like Christ in agony on the cross. But because McQueen has told you little of Brandon's or his sister's past, you get no insight into how they turned out the way they did. It's empty sex for us, too.

With a mustache and specs, Fassbender plays Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen's Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg from a script by Christopher Hampton. It begins with Jung's patient Sabina Spielrein, a disturbed Russian Jewish woman, driven to a hospital screaming her head off. She's played by Keira Knightley in a style that would seem big from the third balcony, spitting out her consonants and working her long jaw so hard it hurts to look at her. But I admire Knightley's guts; she physicalizes every emotion, a nice contrast to all the repression going on in the other characters.

Jung begins as an eager protege of the older Freud, with whom he dines in Vienna, where they speak of this strange new field of psychotherapy. Mortensen is a model of witty restraint: His Freud studies people with amusement, puffing on a cigar that's not just a cigar, since he looks like he's having dirty thoughts. That's one source of the rift between him and Jung, who's open to mysticism and the supernatural, who doesn't want sex to be the only explanation for how people behave.

But sex looms pretty large in A Dangerous Method. Goaded on by a patient who is also a therapist (he's played with delicious lewdness by Vincent Cassel), Jung pursues an S&M affair with Sabina — who then becomes a therapist herself and tries to convince Freud that the sex drive is demonic and self-annihilating. He listens, studying her, puffing on his cigar.

On first viewing, I found A Dangerous Method a wordy bore, but I saw it again after seeing Shame and did — not a 180, but at least a 160-degree turnaround. That wordiness, coupled with Cronenberg's classical restraint, is part of a splendid Freudian joke at the movie's center. It's fun to watch these eggheads try so earnestly to create a theoretical framework for their sexual impulses — as opposed to, say, Fassbender's sex addict in Shame, who unemotionally acts them out, and proves no more interesting than a zombie.

A DANGEROUS METHOD review

A Dangerous Method is Canadian Madman David Cronenberg’s latest.

It tells the (mostly) true story of the birth of psychoanalysis, and the relationships between Carl Jung, Sigmund Frued and Sabina Spielrein. Also there’s a lot of stuff about sex, and there is spanking, so you know you’re in for a good time.

Michael Fassbender, who continues to be both awesome and in every single movie that comes out now, is great as Jung and Aragorn Mortensen is a real treat as Frued, who is constantly smoking a cigar and is constantly bearded.

But the real stand-out here is Keira Knightley, who is most famous for being the British version of Natalie Portman and also being a wet blanket in those stupid Pirate movies.

Knightley is fantastic here, playing Spielrein as a tortured animal of a woman, all jutting jaws and choked words. Also she looks really good getting spanked.

The film is based on a play, which means there’s not much action, just people sitting around talking. Thankfully what they are talking about is really interesting, and the actors doing the talking are all very good.

The only flaw is we don’t really learn anything about these people, with the exception of Spielrein. I guess since they were all REAL people we can just look them up on Wikipedia to find out what they were really like, but both Jung and Frued are sort of blank in this film, despite the good performances.

I love David Cronenberg and will continue to be excited for any movie he makes. However, there is a part of me that wishes he would get back to making the awesome monster porn movies of his glory days.

I give A Dangerous Method three and a half out of four Fassbender’s.