Safe treatment?; a review of the David Cronenberg movie 'A Dangerous Method'

I first saw this movie on a quiet Monday afternoon at the Stratford Picture House. There were three other people in the audience and I convinced myself that they must all be psychotherapists like myself filling a quiet afternoon with an entertaining but CPD worthy diversion. At the end of the movie as I left the auditorium an old man turned to me scratching his head and said 'that was all rather deep wasn't it? One for the mind me thinks'. Ah the power of projection...

I'd enjoyed the film and so was interested to see how I'd find it on a second viewing as a DVD.

A Dangerous Method is directed by David Cronenberg, more well known for disturbing horror films like Shivers and The Fly, and this is his adaptation of the Christopher Hampton stage play 'The Talking Cure' about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung; starring Viggo Mortensen as Freud, Michael Fassbender as Jung and Keira Knightley as Jung's famous patient Sabina Spielrein.

I watched the DVD with and without the directors commentary. Cronenberg's commentary reveals I think the problem with this movie. It's not that it's a bad film or an uninteresting film its just that fidelity to form; the historical subject matter (save for some artistic licence in the imagining of sado-masochistic relationship between Jung and his patient Spielrein. There is no evidence as far as I'm aware that he ever spanked her) seems adhered to at the expense of the creative and imaginative flair we might have expected from Cronenberg. So for example in the commentary we hear all about the fastidious lengths the director went to to ensure everything was realistic and historically accurate, including; cleverly CGI-ing a modern Lake Como to make it look like Lake Lucerne, cosmetically crafting a special nose for Freud, finding a garden wall that had just the right texture to stand in for a wall of the Bugelezi Clinic, and having a facsimile made of Freud's original chair. So what we get is a reverential, respectable, largely historically accurate if rather low-key conventional film; all a bit Open University and not that cinematic. I found myself wondering what Ken Russell would have made of the same material if he'd been commissioned to make this film in his early BBC Monitor years (I'm thinking of those wonderful biopics on Debussy and Elgar).

Moretensen's and Fassbender's performances are subtle and strong, both managing to convey the intense intellect and interiority of their characters, Mortensen is especially good as a wily chain-smoking Freud (his skin seems yellow and parchment like from so much nicotine), Fassbender is a little bland in places and hard to reconcile with the creative genius who wrote and illustrated the Red Book, but Keira Knightley is more problematic. For a start unlike Mortensen and Fassbenber who speak English with precise diction Knightley's character speaks English with an unconvincing cod Russian accent. In his commentary Cronenberg suggests Knightley is 'more than a trooper', and threw herself into the part 'with great exuberance' (including another pond, though unlike the pond scene in Atonement a film incidentally where I thought she was rather good, this time she comes up covered in mud/shit -a symbol perhaps of her descent into the unconscious). In his commentary Cronenberg says casting can make or break a film commending Knightley and Fassbender's oncscreen chemistry, but I can't but help feel she's miscast here, there's too much jaw-jutting overacting and gurning.

The film is strong on the father/son like relationship and rivalry of Jung and Freud, I particularly liked the way Jung's concept of synchronicity is explored. There is also an excellent performance by Vincent Cassel as maverick psychoanalyst and anarchist Otto Gross (who also had his father issues-his father had him incarcerated at the Bugelezi Clinic). Gross who argued one should 'never repress anything' and can be seen as a personification of the ID, gives tacit permissive support to Jung's taboo breaking sexual relationship with patient Spielrein (who went onto become a pioneer of child analysis and was murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust), a dual relationship which would be considered a gross violation of boundaries and serious misconduct judged by today's professional standards. We see Cassel as a bearded unkempt but rather charismatic Gross sniffing cocaine, rifling through Jung's office looking for drugs and having sex with a uniformed female nurse in the grounds of the Clinic. There's an edge and aliveness in these scenes with Cassel that seems lacking elsewhere in the movie, and I was disappointed the Gross character didn't feature more than it does, and the challenge of his views is never really addressed. Another movie perhaps?

In my opinion this isn't a great movie, in its earnest bid for fairness and historical objectivity it somehow never quite takes off, and remains rather literal, but I think it will be of interest to anyone who has ever had psychotherapy and especially interesting to analysts. There's so much of Freudian and Jungian psychology we take for granted today and the film reminds us just how revolutionary Freud and Jung's ideas were and how divergent their thinking eventually became.

Anyone interested in a Jungian analysis of this film might be interested in a series of lectures posted on Andrew Samuels website www.andrewsamuels.com . The six lectures includes a very interesting lecture by Samuels himself where he explores interesting themes connected to the movie including: the overlap of narrative truth and historical truth, polyamory and 'kink', what Sabina Spielrein tells us about structural forms of the feminine psyche and psychoanalysis and anti-semitism.