Director David Cronenberg’s new film about the lives of famous psychiatric scientists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, A Dangerous Method, didn’t feel much to me like a David Cronenberg movie. That’s not to say that it wasn’t nice to look at, or wasn’t well made, just that it lacked that certain manic energy and unpredictability that Cronenberg’s signature work usually has. This was a pretty straight forward character drama told in a period setting. And I’d even go as far as to say that the movie was kind of slight. It doesn’t go enough into the development of psychoanalysis to really be a movie about that, it doesn’t go enough into Jung’s relationship with one of his patients to really be a movie about that, and it doesn’t go enough into the strained friendship between Jung and Freud to be a movie about that either. As it is, it feels like we’re getting the bullet points of three different films. I think this movie needed to pick one of those stories and really focus on it, dig deep, and take a closer look. But it didn’t, so I guess that’s neither here nor there.
What’s good about the movie are the performances it gives us from Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen. Fassbender is playing Jung, Mortensen Freud, and they both look really comfortable stepping into such famous shoes. Both of these actors are fun to watch in an inherent way, so they know that they don’t have to fluff up these performances with historical impersonations or wonky period speak to make them entertaining. They play the characters very straight and subdued, and watching the subtle little things they do when bouncing back and forth off of each other was much of the joy of the film. On the opposite side of the coin I found Keira Knightley’s performance as the patient that Jung starts an affair with to be embarrassingly overacted. In the early scenes, where she is afflicted of terrible mental illness and having fits, she looks less like she’s a disturbed person struggling with inner turmoil and more like a cartoon character sticking her finger in a light socket during an episode of Tom & Jerry. And later on, when she’s recovered and trying to fit back into normal life, she doesn’t so much play developmentally arrested as she does Shirley Temple. Knightley’s big performance is probably the most Cronenberg aspect of this film, but next to the sophisticated work that Fassbender and Mortensen were doing, it just looked out of place.
