The Cronenberg Crawl: Come for the Accents, Stay For The Bondage Edition

I hate this movie.

I generally applaud David Cronenberg’s devout love of brevity. I really do. But in order to adapt Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure into something more suitable for a jittery, distractible film audience, he’s trimmed the already-brisk original screenplay down to a starved, skeletal, ninety-seven-minute corset-ripper. So get this movie a sandwich, because this poor thing looks hungry, and get out of this movie's way, because it's in a big damn hurry.

Apparently the many minutes left out of this movie included any reason we might have for caring about the characters bickering on screen, other than the fact that the characters are important thinkers and they are bickering about important things. This is a problem because, even if what Jung, Freud, and Kiera Knightly say and do is significant according to modern historians, it doesn’t mean that what they say and do is interesting to this movie’s audience. A Dangerous Method wants to be an account of the complicated relationship between two brilliant psychiatrists and the woman who has the potential to rise to their level. Unfortunately, because the movie clips by so damn fast we get the feeling that most of the drama is taking place while we’re busy watching another character hurtle through his own arc. Thus, A Dangerous Method is not about disillusionment in academia, the strain of having a famous mentor, the birth of psychoanalysis, and sex, lies, and anti-Semitism in Victorian Europe. It’s about Michael Fassbender pretending to be Jung, Viggo Mortenson pretending to be Freud, and Kiera Knightly pretending to be Russian.

"I'M CRAZY!"

And boy, does Kiera Knightly bring her Russian A-game. She is aggressively, furiously, in-your-face Russian. She lays her accent on so thick you can barely understand what she’s saying. The good news is that for the first twenty minutes, Miss Knightly’s character is demented, so what she says isn’t particularly important. But in the next two acts she becomes a highly literate, mentally balanced academic (apparently in a couple of afternoons), so we ought to care about her thoughts, opinions, and observations. Just kidding; she plays a Jewish woman in Victorian Europe, so it’s okay with these characters if Miss Knightly talks like she’s gargling a mouthful of borscht. 

What’s more, Miss Knightly’s transformation from spastic to sane also seems to have been left on the editing room floor, because when Miss Knightly plays crazy, she plays Black Swan crazy. When we first meet her she is thrashing in puddles and yelling at no one through carriage windows. Then Michael Fassbender decides to let her analyze a word association test he did on his wife, and Knightly is cured, though unfortunately still Russian.

"I'M SOOOOO CRAZY!"

Other than that, there’s not a lot of movie to talk about. Michael Fassbender is fine and Vigo Mortenson brings his best Freud face but there really isn’t anything here to connect with or get excited about. I would say something about Vincent Cassel’s performance because he’s a well-known actor in a bit part, but I frankly forgot he was in this movie until I rewatched the trailer while writing this review. I think he’s the guy who talks Fassbender into having sex with Knightly, so we can blame him for those sequences.

Oh yeah -- Fassbender and Knightly have an affair, and there’s some rudimentary bondage and spanking scenes (which of course got top billing in the movie’s marketing) but this subplot of Knightly's and Fassbender's suppressed and explosive desires  is hardly more engaging than anything else that happens in this movie. We just don’t care about these people enough to care about their relationship. We do get to watch Fassbender spank Knightly into what looks like a hilariously telegraphed orgasm, which is apparently possible in this movie, so this scene is worth the price of popcorn if not the price of admission. This scene is particularly memorable because all the slapping and yelling caught my attention (I was too bored to think straight that this point) and got me to look up from my knitting for a couple of minutes. But then Knightly starts up talking again in her ever-loving Russian voice and I was back to being more involved with my knitting. Some more stuff happens. Jung write a letter. Jung and Freud get on a boat. Jung goes to America. Jung comes back. Knightly dies in the Holocaust. Then it's over.

"SERIOUSLY CRAZY!"

If you’re in the mood for a Cronenberg movie, you have at least a dozen other far more interesting films to choose from. There’s one where Jeff Goldbloom turns into a giant fly and one where Jeremy Irons thinks John Lone is a woman (M. Butterfly), for starters. Cronenberg pretty much canonized the concept of body horror, but it looks like costume drama chamber pieces just aren’t his game. Mortenson and Fassbender have both been in better films and Knightly has surrounded herself with better performers for so long that she’s managed to trick most people into thinking she can actually act. Given the filmography of all involved, A Dangerous Method is a a disappointing, lackluster turn, and it’s a memory I’m better off repressing. 

"Cured!"

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!