There’s madness to director Cronenberg’s movie Method
David cronenberg’s films frequently explore the transformation of bodies and the psychology that follows from that, a genre that resulted in a lot of oozing and bodily fluids in the earlier, wetter films, and much brooding in his later, more mature ones. A Dangerous Method seems like a departure — it’s about the ideas of psychoanalysis as developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
But around the time Keira Knightley twists her face into paroxysms of orgasmic pain as she’s being spanked with a belt by Michael Fassbender, we realize that a) the human mind can never be divorced from the body that houses it, and b) Keira Knightley can contort her chin into an alarming forward thrust.
Knightley plays the real-life Sabina Spielrein, a young Russian woman who, in the late 1890s, was transported to the Swiss clinic of Dr. Jung (Fassbender) to see if his new “talking cure” could save her.
It doesn’t take long for Dr. Jung to discover that she has spent her childhood being physically abused by her father, and that she enjoyed it. “I looked for any humiliation,” she recalls, an instant psychotherapeutic breakthrough that you suspect would have taken years under stricter freudian analysis. “I’m vile, filthy and corrupt.”
Such self-laceration is the beginning of a cure, apparently, although Sabina will never lose her taste for the lash. She becomes the masochistic lover of Dr. Jung, an otherwise calm and measured man. He’s married to a wealthy woman (sarah gadon), who does not satisfy his perverse urges. Having a mistress to spank is ju st the thing.
This adventure in sexual liberty is a metaphor of sorts that occurs under the far-off tutelage of a superego in the person of Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Freud is a father figure to Jung, just as Mortensen is something of a muse to Cronenberg (this is their third film together), and the therapists analyze one another’s dreams with a quick facility.
The screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on his play The Talking Cure, portrays a subtle conflict that will eventually result in differing approaches to psychiatry. It’s a talky film, but the characters are so rich that even the rhetorical shortcuts are compelling:
The result is a dreamy but somewhat stilted historical document whose sexual obsessions come with the sense of remove that sometimes characterizes Cronenberg’s films. Mortensen provides some acerbic spark, but the real treat is a small role by Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross.