A Dangerous Method

Would someone please give Keira Knightley a job? Something time consuming and insanely rewarding. The next time she’s offered a role in a high-prestige film project, I want her feeling happy and fulfilled and busy. If there were no other reason to see David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, and there are plenty, it would be worth sitting through just to see her animatronic impression of violent mental illness. It’s an acting-for-acting’s-sake excess that sits oddly with the flat effect she defaults to after her character’s illness recedes. The remarkable thing is that she doesn’t sink the film.

Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein, a patient and lover of Carl Jung’s who subsequently became an associate of Sigmund Freud’s and one of the first female psychoanalysts. The complex relationships between the three were first explored in John Kerr’s 1994 book A Most Dangerous Method, which was adapted for the stage, and now for the screen, by Christopher Hampton. His writing is marred by an unfortunate fondness for ham-fisted expository dialogue, but he also gives his characters real conceptual depth. Many of the film’s exchanges between Freud and Jung adapt actual remarks they made in public or in their letters, a route to authenticity that would trip up many writers in short order; Hampton manages to blend his famous source material into his dialogue virtually seamlessly.

This would be a wasted achievement in the absence of good acting, but here Cronenberg pulls out two trump cards: Freud is played by Viggo Mortensen and Jung by Michael Fassbender. Mortensen’s austere patriarch, first charmed, then threatened, and finally enraged by his young disciple and rival, is a great creation, and the great performance of the film. Fassbender is his usual complex, tortured screen self; after watching him be complex and tortured in every third film of the past year, I’m beginning to long for a change of register, but if inhabiting Jung’s idealism and hypocrisies doesn’t extend him, it certainly doesn’t present him with any difficulties. Whenever he and Mortensen are on screen together, it’s impossible to look away.

Not that looking away is much of a temptation in any case. James McAteer’s production design is a glory of intensely patterned creams and blacks, representing Jung’s Zurich home and Freud’s institute in Vienna as elegant visual symphonies built around the tension and mutual attraction of opposites. It’s a highly stylised representation of the screenplay’s highly rarified ideas, which is perhaps why Knightley’s highly artificial performance doesn’t feel more out of place. But Spielrein, potentially the film’s most interesting character as well as its most sympathetic, deserves a richer screen presence than Knightley can give her. Jung abused her trust, while Freud belittled her achievements. It’s a sad irony that they seem so alive here, while her inner life reaches us only as a vague noise echoing from behind a plastic mask. 

A DANGEROUS METHOD, directed by David Cronenberg.

There’s no denying The Most Fun You Can Have Dying, the debut feature from Kiwi director Kirstin Marcon, has style to burn. A dark love story played out on the edge of an abyss, it has momentum, good acting and excellent cinematography that makes the most of its New Zealand and European settings. But alas it’s as hollow as a drum. Michael (Matt Whelan) is 20-odd, shallow and terminally ill. He decides to steal $200,000, live wild for his last few months and go out on a high. He falls for a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (depressive nightmare model) and oh, the wild times, they do ensue.

The film wants to show us how brightly we can burn when we know we’re burning out, but its characters are conceived in such broad strokes that their emotional journey amounts to little more than posturing. If half-baked banality dressed as goth is your idea of fun, then by all means take the title seriously.

THE MOST FUN YOU CAN HAVE DYING, directed by Kirstin Marcon.