Review: A Dangerous Method

 I think A Dangerous Method is one of the most perfectly scored films I have ever seen. Composer Howard Shore’s key musical motif trembles with nervous uncertainty, and this unrest grew in me as I watched David Cronenberg’s film unfold. As drama, A Dangerous Method is drab, unimportant, and even ham-fisted, but I believe that to judge it solely on those terms is to miss its key evocative strengths. Tapped-in, plugged-in, whatever queasily semi-sexual metaphor you want to use, A Dangerous Method feeds on an undercurrent of the collision of order and chaos that is, by dint of its precise choice of subject, haunting, disturbing, and illuminating.

The avatar of this discovery is Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, who is introduced and exited in two carriage rides that bracket the film. In the first, she is screaming, thrashing, dragged and restrained by medical handlers; in the latter scene, she is pregnant, somber, and wise. Cronenberg doesn’t trouble himself with too much subtlety around what will become the salient point: in both cases, she is female, and in the tightly-controlled, nearly ascetic, imaginary universe of A Dangerous Method, that’s something that only Spielrein will get to be – even among the other female characters.

It is the conversation between these two incarnations of Spielrein that will make the movie work its most effective magic. This is a good thing, because the alternative is Michael Fassbender’s rather more starchy position as the ostensible protagonist of the piece, Carl Jung. Caught in what I would call a rather stock Cronenbergian dilemma – a man with two selves, and the question of how to mediate between them – McFasser gives his least compelling 2011 performance in A Dangerous Method, failing to find Jung’s balls, and everything they imply, beyond the matter-of-factness of strolling into his first scene and announcing “Good morning, I’m Dr. Jung.” It’s a thankless role, and Fassbender is nearly treated like a patsy. He does everything he’s supposed to do perfectly well, and Jebus, he’s boring for it.

But back to Spielrein. Cronenberg has discovered, quite rightly, that Knightley’s alien-like bone structure is uniquely suited, in a cinematic sense, to paroxysm; Spielrein spazzes her way through the first act of the movie under the weight of the blossoming awareness that she enjoys humiliation and corporal punishment, and we can feel it, see it, and smell it. It’s a corseted desire so dark that that Knightley can barely spit out the words, chewing her way around Russian w’s in a near-epileptic fit of nascent naughtiness. Jung’s application of “the talking cure” in drawing out this desire is perfectly successful from a medical perspective, but altogether more useful from the perspective of making A Dangerous Method finally become interesting to watch. Early on, Spielrein escapes her bonds and frolics in a muddy hole out in the sanitorium grounds, and it’s an image of the character that never fully seems to wash out - Sabina is a muddy ball of primordial chaos that splatters straight through the worthless white world of men. Jewish, dark-haired, Russian, professional, ambitious, and in fully-assimilated need of a much-desired spanking, Spielrein might be the most complete Everything Your Wife Is Not character in the whole history of Other Women in film. That Cronenberg never leans quite so far as to make her appealing – she’s more scary than erotic – is perhaps closer to the truth of the thing anyway. In stark contrast to Jung’s bleached wife, Emma, Sabina seems to be in full 3-D surround sound, with Emma (the only other major female character in the film) the onscreen equivalent of a faded fresco on a background wall somewhere.

Meanwhile, Freud and Jung, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender, argue delicately with one another about the roots and nature of psychoanalysis, and swap dreams, and chew on cigars. Jung begins the ill-fated exploration of his sexual attraction to Spielrein, “turning the pig loose” as Herzog would say, and only here does the film’s dusty visual style break down into brief, tantalizing moments of visual invention. Mirrors make their presence known, and elliptical framing, and shock-cuts to dirty, inadvisable, very-human thrashings. In the gutters, underneath the picture-perfect Viennese gardens, all our human mud seems to be flowing, calling out to us to jump in.

By this I begin to suspect that we needed Freud and Jung, or others like them, to invent psychoanalysis, simply because upon our arrival at some self-important sense of our own civilization, a language needed to be coined through which one could enter into a conversation with every roiling, boiling, masturbatory urge that lives quite unrepentantly beneath the finer clothes of our rational selves. Jung’s world, bought and paid for by his wealthy wife, is so run through with overexposed alabaster that the suspicious appearance of Spielrein’s blood-red nipple, sticking impishly out from one side of her misadjusted corset in a key scene, might as well be a stuck-out tongue.

Now I must return to the point that on most of its objective surfaces, I don’t think A Dangerous Method is very good; or at least, it suffers by a plague of unremarkability in all of its formal, textual aspects. And yet it worked on me – and I mean that specifically, it worked on me, like a strange deep-tissue rubdown for my psychological synapses. I found the text boring and the movie as a whole enthralling. I mentioned Howard Shore’s score. It is a simple score, and A Dangerous Method is a simple (and simplistic) script, and is shot in undemonstrative coverage (over, over, two-shot), and seems to jump out of scenes quickly, before any dramatic weight can be extracted. But, like the music, the anxious vibrato of A Dangerous Method’s subliminal image system began to reverberate in me. Without ever directly seeming to, the film constructs a model of Freud, Jung and Spielrein’s conflicting and complementary beliefs, and peels away some of the mystery of psychiatry’s role in forming our modern selves. By the end, our selves underneath – a woman deemed crazy, playing in the mud – are cackling.