A Dangerous Method (2011)

Four pedantic intellectuals try to out-psychoanalyze one another. The end.
....oh wait. I forgot to make it an hour and half and show Kiera Knightly's breasts.

I suppose I can't really say that these four people are psychoanalyzing one another since the film is somewhat about the birth of the field, but that is essentially how the characters interact. The previews for the film led me to believe that this was going to be about Carl Jung's duplicitous relationship with one of his mental patients. And it was--up to a point. What the previews neglected to show was the intense relations held between Jung and Sigmund Freud as two pioneers into the field of the mind. This movie is halfway between a story of a man using a very troubled woman to explore his own repressed sexual urges, and a brewing storm between two great minds who can do nothing but try to out-think one another and throw about meaningless words.

Judging by the first scene of the film I fell into the trap of thinking it would a complex story about the former point. Michael Fassbender plays Jung, who takes in a new case in 1904, one Sabrina Spielrein (Knightly), a Russian Jew whose repressed sexual urges towards her father make her a wild beast in a woman's form. This was quite the departure for Knightly, though not always a good one. Easily slighted but a brilliant analyst herself, her changes in mood made her violent and destructive. There were moments where Knightly shined and had the capacity to steal the movie, but she bordered so dangerously on the line of overacting that it made it nearly impossible to watch her comfortably.

With quite the opposite problem was Fassbender, whose character was so dull and so confused that I could not reconcile the fact that people kept referring to him as a brilliant thinker. More often than not he was asking clarifying questions and really had little idea of how to go about doing anything. Fassbender is a great actor and I am very excited to see the work that he does in the future, but here he struggled to get beyond a script that kept him static and lost.

As Jung, this feral Russian beauty entices him to betray his wife and take on a mistress where he explores the darker sides of human sexuality. This naturally brings him into contact with Freud, who is played magnificently by Viggo Mortensen as the pompous but egocentric genius of his field, always spotting phallic symbols in dreams and continuously commenting on the actions of humans being driven by sexual urges. A friendship between the two blossoms, but much of the second half of the film is the deterioration of the bond as differences in their work create irreconcilable conflicts. Sabrina gets caught in the war--or perhaps drives it--and suddenly there is a big gooey cerebral mess.

Also thrown in the midst for good measure it Otto Gross (a very good Vincent Cassel), the fourth analyst, a neurotic, and coke-user who was the catalyst for Jung's sudden inhibitions.

By all accounts I should have really enjoyed this film. There were two and half very good performances (maybe bumping it up to three if I give points to Fassbender for his final scene with Knightly) and themes that interest me very much. The production itself was very beautiful with lush costumes and sets, but all the same I found myself checking the time far more often than I usually do. The issue with this was that the drama was very niche oriented and conflicts were solved in passive-aggressive ways. Intense arguments were done via mail half of the time. Now that may be how it actually happened in real life between Jung and Freud, but that doesn't make for very good film-watching.

I think that the script was a bit too wordy for the silver screen, but would have done wonderfully on stage. There were definite moments when I was very aware that conversations were happening specifically to give information to the audience, which is awful. A good writer should never make his presence known. These characters were far too smart to be having some of the conversations that they did in the way that they did, so it was obviously for the benefit of its inept movie-goers.

If I were a film producer I would almost certainly have passed on this script. It was too verbose with too much sitting around. The beginning and the end were well done, but it slogged along in the middle. However, I do think that this could be very successfully translated into a play and that it would do very well within certain audiences--particularly the BDSM crowd.

2/4