The Case for Method Acting

I am not entirely sure why A Dangerous Method did not appeal to me when I first saw the trailer for it.  It had a great cast (Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley in the main roles) and charted the relationship between Carl Jung (Fassbender), his mentor Freud (Mortensen) and his patient/protégé Sabina Spielrein (Knightley) in the newly developing field of psycho analysis.  But the trailer itself left me a little cold and uninspired.

And it did not get off to the best of starts.  Knightley arrives at the sanitarium a shrieking mess of jutting jaw and wild impulses, a condition that also seems to affect her accent.  While I am sure her portrayal is based on descriptions of the real behaviours of Spielrein, that degree of physical distress would seem unlikely to be resolved purely through talk (i.e., no drugs or physical therapies), though I speak obviously as someone unfamiliar with the case.

Meanwhile, Fassbender and Mortensen (what a nose!  Is that really Aragorn?) play things completely cool, while underneath their placid exteriors, they battle jealousy and conflicting points of view.  Both of these actors are excellent, even if their characters come across as aloof and distant.

The film is set and shot in beautiful buildings in the Swiss countryside and in sumptuous if cramped Vienna locations (and a very bad CGI steam ship too), but the film feels very intimate and small in scale, as it focuses intently on its main characters and their fairly Victorian styles of talking and comporting themselves.  It is therefore a little bit of a surprise when the odd scene of bondage slips in, as of course for Freud, everything stemmed from the $ex drive. 

We seemed to share the viewing with a couple of Psychology majors, who laughed loudly at the clash of ideologies, both philosophically (the whole Id, Ego and Superego trinity gets bandied about a couple of times) and physically, as Freud and Jung get more frosty and biting with each other.  In the end, the film was less about familiarizing people with the theories and treatments and more about the frosting relationship between the two greats of the field with the odd bit of hanky panky and Keira Knightley's boobs thrown in (and occasionally out) as well.

Verdict:  A Dangerous Method is not really about the dangers inherent in some of psychoanalysis's methods.  Rather than getting all technical and documentary-like, the film focuses on the lives and loves of Jung, and how he was both influenced by and influences the other greats in the field in which he made his name.  It's an oddly detached film that, while fascinating, is not completely engaging.  6 Rorschach shapes out of 10.