Dangerous Method, by David Cronenberg

Release Date: 10/02/2012

Genre: Drama, Biopic

Run Time: 99 minutes

The Story:

  Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender star in director David Cronenberg's adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play detailing the deteriorating relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as they contend with a particularly troubled patient. Carl Jung (Fassbender), a disciple of Sigmund Freud (Mortensen), is using Freudian techniques to treat Russian-Jewish psychiatric patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) at Burgholzli Mental Hospital. But the deeper Jung's relationship with Spielrein grows, the further the burgeoning psychiatrist and his highly respected mentor drift apart. As Jung struggles to help his patient overcome some pressing paternal issues, disturbed patient Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) sets out to test the boundaries of the doctor's professional resolve. Meanwhile, Jung and Freud's continued sessions with Spielrein lead to a series of profound breakthroughs in the methods that doctors use to treat their patients.

The Reviews:

 David Gritten from the telegraph wrote: "The film, A Dangerous Method, is set between 1904 and the eve of the First World War, and recounts the increasingly tense relationship between the two key figures in the early history of psychoanalysis: Carl Jung (Fassbender) and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

Jung was inspired by Freud, but increasingly came to question the rigidity of his beliefs, particularly in regard to sexual matters. Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein, a young, highly intelligent Russian-Jewish woman from an affluent background, who in both personal and professional terms comes between them.

She is initially seen as a disruptive, troubled 18-year-old and diagnosed with hysteria. Spielrein is admitted to the Zurich hospital where Jung practises; he tries Freud’s experimental psychoanalytic treatment on her, then known as 'the talking cure’.

Sabina becomes the third side of this combustible triangular relationship when Jung – bourgeois, outwardly respectable, with a wealthy pregnant wife – unearths the root of her dysfunction: the humiliation of regular beatings from her father and her shame at the sexual element this arouses in her. Jung then embarks on an affair with her, a breach of the therapist-patient relationship that horrifies Freud. As the film’s director, David Cronenberg, puts it, 'It’s an intellectual ménage à trois.’

The presence of Cronenberg on the set seems at first glance to be another contradiction. After all, this veteran Canadian (he is 68) made his name with a series of eye-popping genre movies – Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome – that between them included scenes of rampaging zombies, an exploding human head, and a man with a video recorder in his stomach. Though Cronenberg veered away from blood, gore and body parts in his more austere and cerebral recent films (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises), it feels odd to find him directing a dialogue-heavy period piece in such a stately, tranquil setting.

But that misses the point, he says: 'My other movies are irrelevant to me. The movie I’m making at any time tells me what it needs, and I try to give it that. Sometimes I have to remind people that my first film [made in 1966] was Transfer, a seven-minute short which featured a psychiatrist. This is subject matter that interests me.’

Is there an audience for such an intellectually engaging film? 'You can only go with what you’d want to watch,’ Knightley reflects. 'I found the story absolutely fascinating. This was a script that made me ask so many questions. And you think to yourself, I can’t be the only one.’ read more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Xan Brooks from Guardian did not seem to like the movies as he rated it with just two stars: "The irony, though, is that whereas Freud is presented as a celibate old shaman, Jung is off living the dream, swinging the hinge until it howls out in protest. He is married and siring child after child while simultaneously carrying on an affair with Sabina Spielrein (Knightley), a brilliant hysteric who is an inmate at his hospital. Sabina bares her teeth and juts an extraordinary, elongated chin that should by rights have been shot in 3D. She is, she claims, "vile and filthy and corrupt" and her greatest desire is to be tied up and spanked. Jung, with a pained, frowning diligence, duly obliges.

But spanking, as any good psychiatrist should know, has consequences. In this particular case, it winds up exciting Sabina to a worrying degree, making Jung more miserable than he was before and comprehensively torpedoing the friendship with Freud, who initially defends his protege and then feels a fool for doing so. What the spanking can't do, unfortunately, is knock some life into this heartfelt, well-acted but curiously underwhelming slab of Masterpiece Theatre. A Dangerous Method feels heavy and lugubrious. It is a tale that comes marinated in port and choked on pipe-smoke. You long for it to hop down from the couch, throw open the windows and run about in the garden."

read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk