Old Yorker

David Cronenberg (2011)

Since the older man developed the Oedipus theory, the falling out of Freud and Jung could hardly fail to be a classic case of a father-son power struggle.  On the poster for A Dangerous Method, the faces of Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender pair up amusingly. When I first saw it, I had to look twice to check which was which.  On closer inspection, they’re expressively different:   Mortensen’s Freud exudes handsome maturity, sternness, a surprising hint of warmth.  Fassbender, behind steel-rimmed spectacles, looks chilly, a little priggish, the kind of young man who wants to prove he’s smarter than the paterfamilias.    Between them on the poster is Keira Knightley, who is playing Sabina Spielrein, Jung’s analysand, then student, then lover during the first decade of the twentieth century.  The film, which tells the story of the several stages of this relationship, and of the relationship of Jung and Freud too, has no narrative or dramatic momentum.  There isn’t any dynamic between any of the actors or a single rhythmical or nuanced scene.  Plenty of scenes are lamely staged, though:  when Freud and Jung are travelling to America, the onboard sequences are so perfunctory that it’s almost surprising to see the movement of water, rather than a painted backdrop, through the portholes.   I mentioned to Sally as we were watching trailers that it was odd I hadn’t seen one for A Dangerous Method.  It doesn’t seem odd now that I’ve seen the film:  Universal reasonably don’t want to drive audiences away before they have to.  What’s now a mystery is that this terrible movie hasn’t had a critical mauling.  It must be a case of the director’s reputation preceding and protecting him.

A standard example of zeugma is ‘She went home in floods of tears and a sedan chair’.   Sabina Spielrein arrives at the Burgholzli clinic in Zurich in a horse-drawn carriage and a screaming fit.  Keira Knightley maintains the high volume as she’s carried up the steps of the clinic entrance and it takes a good twenty minutes of screen time for her to start to calm down.  In her first meeting with Jung, Sabina says, ‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’ or words to that effect.  You want Fassbender to reply, ‘Yes, because, apart from anything else, you’re speaking in heavily accented English whereas, although I’m playing a Swiss, I’m speaking in a normal voice’.  It turns out that Sabina is Russian but, since we’re also told that she’s multi-lingual, why does she need to sound like a Soviet agent in a Cold War spy thriller?  Knightley has practised the accent hard and approaches the part as if she knows that, playing someone mentally ill, she has a head start in the awards stakes.  (The pathos of watching her is that, as it turns out, she didn’t.  The pathos of listening is that, spouting high-flown intellectual verbiage, she rarely sounds as if she knows what she’s talking about.  She reminds you of Diane Keaton in Love and Death ­– but only because she’s so inadequate compared with Keaton, who makes her character’s nonsense philosophising sound thought through.)  This is one of those performances that is so overdone for so long that eventually the actor exhausts herself and, at that point, comes through with something truthful.  (It’s in the tradition of Brenda Blethyn in Secrets and Lies and Tom Cruise in Magnolia.)   But the truthful moments are few and far between here.  Knightley emotes and gurns and breathes irregularly – she does everything a screen hysteric should but it’s embarrassing;  after not very long, I wanted to look down each time she appeared.  Once Sabina and Jung embark on their sexual relationship (this involves a fair amount of his whipping her, as Sabina’s father also did when she was a child), you dread the affair ending because you know she’ll start acting bonkers again.  Keira Knightley is far from a bad actress, as Bend It Like Beckham and Never Let Me Go (and, for all I know, Pride and Prejudice) have proved.  But, at this stage of her career anyway, she hasn’t the emotional weight or variety needed to carry a film (seeing bits of The Duchess on television the other week, I was struck mainly by the discrepancy between her huge wigs and tinny little voice) or to play serious dramatic roles.

Before we saw the film yesterday, I kept thinking of the exchange with Freud which Jung describes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections as follows:

‘… I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot – a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over us. I said to Freud: “There is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.” ‘

If Jung really did express himself in this way, it would be hard for any scenarist worth his salt to write more improbable dialogue.   That incident and what Jung said to Freud are included in A Dangerous Method and the line caused the people in the row behind us to laugh.  It’s an irony that I thought it was one of the best-delivered lines in the whole of the film:  Michael Fassbender speaks the words with a smile on his flushed face – in this moment he gets across a sense of Jung’s intellectual excitement and urgency, which he fails to do elsewhere.   The screenplay – based on Christopher Hampton’s 2002 stage play The Talking Cure (which was based on a 1993 work of non-fiction by John Kerr called A Most Dangerous Method: the story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein) – includes other famous real-life one-liners – as when Freud, as he and Jung approach the Statute of Liberty on their translatlantic crossing in 1909, remarks ‘They don’t realise that we are bringing them the plague’.  This is probably Hampton’s excuse for writing dialogue that’s consistently purplish (and stagy) but it’s the construction of the script that’s so poor – major elements in the story make no sense unless you already know it.   Concentrating on the split between Freud and Jung, Cronenberg and Hampton virtually overlook their earlier meeting of minds so there’s nothing much to destroy.  A voiceover tells us that Freud addressed letters to Jung as ‘Dear Friend’; on one of their first meetings, they talk non-stop for thirteen hours – but   Cronenberg and Hampton’s version of this conversation (which really happened, according, I think, to both men) is pathetic.  Freud looks at the clock and says in a slightly reproving tone to Jung ‘Do you realise we’ve been talking thirteen hours?’  Jung simply apologises.  When, later on, Freud tells Jung he doesn’t mind if he dabbles in studying telepathy and parapsychology, it’s complete news that Jung is interested in them anyway (all he’s said up to this point is that he doesn’t believe in coincidence).  Their partnership as thinkers isn’t dramatised at all.  Jung, on his first visit to Vienna, isn’t conspicuously admiring of Freud, who keeps the younger man at arm’s length from the start – there’s never a sense of his being delighted at the discovery of a crown prince, the man who he thinks can eventually succeed him in promoting the science (or art) of psychoanalysis.

The relationship between Jung and Sabina Spielrein appears to be driven entirely, on his part at least, by wanting sex with her.  When he tells Sabina, some years after the affair is over, that she was the love of his life it’s baffling.  Is he denying the simply libidinous feelings he had for her or were we supposed to see there was more to it than those feelings?  A Dangerous Method has it in for Jung, as a man and a psychologist.  Adulterous, duplicitous and evasive, he rejects Freud’s focus on the sexual basis for human behaviour and character as too narrow but, look, he’s a repressed sex maniac himself!  The legends on screen at the end inform us that Jung had a prolonged nervous breakdown in the years that followed the events the film has described, that he ‘eventually’ became the world’s leading psychologist, and that he outlived his wife Emma and Toni Wolff, Sabina’s successor as his mistress.  That ‘eventually’ is grudging and Jung’s longevity seems meant to demonstrate there’s no justice.  (He lived to the age of eighty-five, Freud to eighty-three.)

It’s possible that Cronenberg wanted Michael Fassbender to make Jung the villain of the piece or, at least, unappealing.  Whatever the explanation, A Dangerous Method is remarkable chiefly because it marks Fassbender’s first disappointing performance.  At first, his calmness comes as a welcome relief from Keira Knightley’s histrionics and his neutral line readings are intriguing.  It’s clear already that the dialogue in the film is going to be florid; Fassbender has decided to deflate the words he has to speak.  So far so good but he succeeds only in making them impersonal.  He’s physically miscast – the photographic evidence is that Jung, in his late twenties and early thirties, had a hefty, coarse-grained plainness.  There’s a moment in the film, on his first visit to Vienna, when Jung sits down to dinner with Freud and his family, piles his plate with food and starts tucking in before anyone else is served.  It’s an obvious idea but one that chimes with the personality of Jung that emerges from his writings – a cultural and philosophical appetite that is, in one sense, deeply straightforward and lacking in self-awareness.  Fassbender’s Jung lacks vitality – he appears to have assumed that being sicklied-o’er-with-the-pale-cast-of-thought is a necessary part of being a psychoanalyst.  This miscalculation erodes the temperamental contrast between Jung and Freud:  they seem to be kindred spirits through a shared melancholy.  Viggo Mortensen isn’t bad:  although there’s not much depth to his portrait of Freud, there’s a fair amount of wit in it.  But he’s eclipsed by the shortcomings of the script and by Fassbender’s misconceived playing of Jung.  Vincent Cassel is Otto Gross, who advises Jung to repress nothing and who does at least seem pretty relaxed himself.   The repeatedly child-bearing Emma Jung is played by the pretty, emotionally lightweight Sarah Gadon.

11 February 2012