Image Credit: Liam Daniel
I’m not exactly a cultist for David Cronenberg — I didn’t think A History of Violence was very convincing, or even that The Fly was a great horror film — but I was primed, in Toronto, to see A Dangerous Method, in which Viggo Mortensen plays Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung. Keira Knightley — yes, Keira Knightley — plays the sexed-up, tormented Russian Jewish hysteria patient-turned-psychoanalyst prodigy who comes between the two of them. When you consider that Freud and Jung, along with Einstein, were arguably the most influential thinkers of the last hundred years, there have been precious few dramatic features that have attempted to deal with who they really were. (Montgomery Clift played Freud in a 1962 John Huston biopic, and that movie was every bit as repressed as it sounds.) I went into A Dangerous Method eager to see Freud and Jung come to life on screen as they might, perhaps, have really been. And Cronenberg, at his most restrained, delivers — the movie, though less overtly exciting than some of his others, gave me just what I wanted. It’s a play of sensuality and ideas rooted in the opposing spirits (rational vs. mystical, Jewish Austrian vs. Protestant Swiss) of these two infamous allies-turned-adversaries. READ FULL STORY »
