A Dangerous Method

by Andy Motz

The screams of a young disturbed woman can be heard through the enclosed carriage as horses drag it along the bumpy dirt road. Looming ahead there is a large building that holds the appearance of a serene hospice. It turns out to be a psychiatric ward run by the one and only Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). The woman screaming and convulsing is Sabina (Keira Knightley), she has been shipped to this place due to her bizarre violent outbursts. She comes at a busy time for the up and coming doctor. His sensitive wife is pregnant with their first child and he is in communication with the even more famous Sigmund Freud about his controversial ideas of sexuality.

This is the set up of David Cronenberg‘s recent film, A Dangerous Method. A film so restrained and cold that it seems even more of a diversion from Cronenberg’s earlier work in the eighties and nineties. The film is about sexuality, but it is more about the psychology behind it than the actual bodily aspect. Even his last two films, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, contained carnal visceral elements reminiscent of his bizarre and surrealistic (some might claim perverse) fascination with the human body, yet that is nowhere to be found in this new film. Is this a bad or good thing? I suppose it depends on one’s taste.

Still a more restrained Cronenberg is not automatically equivalent to a lackluster one. A Dangerous Method is a compelling look into the minds, worlds, and actions of these two highly influential psychologists and the issues they wrestled with.  The screenplay, which is at times seems obviously adapted from a stage play, is a character study that chooses three fascinating characters to focus in on.

First off, there is Carl Jung a quiet man who believes he and Freud should move forward in their field going so far as to help patients rise above their problems. Then, there is Freud himself (played marvelously by Viggo Mortensen) who believes their duty is to diagnose the problem, nothing more. Finally, there is Sabina a woman seemingly born with sadomasochistic desires (she enjoyed being spanked by her father at the young age of five), but because of this strives to help others in the psychoanalytical field.

Jung and Sabina soon embark on a bizarre sexual/intellectual affair that continuously conflicts Jung himself while simultaneously fulfilling Sabina’s unusual desires.

As noted above the main conflict is over the overall purpose of psychology. Should psychology simply prescribe the problem or should it search to find a solution?  One’s life experiences often informs his or her answer to this question. Freud, a complacent man with a wife and seven kids, believes he has found the answer to why people act the way they do. Therefore it is his duty to inform society of these reasons and end there. Carl Jung, a man who feels oppressed by his wife and drawn into a fulfilling but unsettling affair, questions Freud’s conclusions and fights to find a solution. He wants a solution for others because he can’t find one for himself.

Indeed America has embraced Jung’s train of thought, but is this the dangerous method the film is titled after? Is trying to save people dangerous? By keeping ones distance such as Freud’s theory and practice does it is easy to live one’s own life uncomplicated by patients. Jung fails hopelessly however in trying to heal Sabrina, in fact one could say he only messes her up more.

So is that the “dangerous method”? Getting involved with a patient? For Sabina it is an infatuation. For Jung this relationship enables him to fully embrace his sexual nature.

Is embracing fully all of ones desires the “dangerous method”? Carl Jung has a brief encounter with renegade psychologist, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), whose own philosophy of life is simply if the mind, heart, or flesh desires it act on it. He says this as one who has impregnated multiple women all of which he has abandoned. In the end, Jung’s relationship with Sabina isn’t freeing, but constricting. The immediate feelings of immense pleasure go away and the affair has ugly, dangerous ramifications on both Sabina and Jung’s life.

Whatever the viewer ultimately concludes the “dangerous method” actually is in this well-acted, meticulously composed, and perhaps too of cold of a film, one thing is for certain: David Cronenberg has crafted another interesting piece that takes conversations of old and transforms them into relevant thought-provoking discussions for the present.

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