Jan. 11, 2012 - Issue #847: The great indoors

A Dangerous Method

Opens Friday
A Dangerous Method
Directed by David Cronenberg
Princess Theatre
 

It may not first seem it, but this drama about the origins of psychoanalysis, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his own play, finds its ideal interpreter in David Cronenberg, who has, after all, forged his career by studying the beast within, and has always conveyed a special knowingness about the myriad ways in which the primitive bristles and burns at the spinal-psychic base of the bourgeoisie. Tracing encounters between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), his acolyte Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Jung's patient and mistress and, finally, an accomplished psychoanalyst in her own right, A Dangerous Method is the story of a precarious new science's difficult development, a love affair and a friendship fraught with conflicting expectations.

The film's tone is eloquent, ironic, restrained, at times epistolary. Manners matter, yet taboo triumphs. There are numerous brilliant, often funny hard cuts between scenes that, though time has passed, almost make us feel Jung is walking from one scene that reveals his unresolved sexual urges to another in which his wife has just given birth. The performances are each beautifully calibrated, and Fassbender is especially compelling in his transmission of the delicate balance of Jung's repressed desires, colossal ambitions and nervous urge toward the esoteric, perhaps as a way of coping with irreconcilable needs.

I spoke with Cronenberg last month about the film. It was his first interview with Vue Weekly since 2002's Spider. We had but a brief window of time, yet he was, as always, generous, articulate and witty.

 
VUE WEEKLY: For me, an especially memorable moment in your body of work is the opening scene of The Brood, a scene that, however unconventional or sinister the treatment being administered in it may be, could be read as suspicious of psychotherapy. Before this project came to you, did you feel any particular unease with psychoanalysis?
DAVID CRONENBERG:  [Laughs] No. No particular wariness. I think every really interesting thing we create has a potential downside or dangerous aspect. Obviously, this movie is called A Dangerous Method, and it was considered so in its time because it was revolutionary, subversive and volatile. Freud was attacked for it. As he said when he came to America on the boat: "Don't they realize we're bringing them the plague?" [Laughs] He was acknowledging the fact that this new therapy was tricky. Things could have unforeseeable repercussions. In The Brood I'm just exaggerating that. It was never meant as a blanket critique of psychotherapy.
 

VW: Over the course of A Dangerous Method, Sabina Spielrein arguably emerges as an example of psychoanalysis' capacity for self-betterment.
DC: Yes. As she says to Jung, "You cured me with his method." Meaning Freud's talking cure. The boundaries of psychoanalysis weren't known—they were still inventing it. So you have to give Otto Gross a little credit here. He was a proto-hippy, questioning everything, and he was saying, "How do we know having sex with your patient is a bad thing?" [Laughs] It was a legitimate question. "What if it turns out to be a useful component of this new therapy we're inventing?" Of course, now it's illegal. But Gross really changed Jung's way of thinking. He shook him out of his bourgeois patterns, and Jung was forever after an advocate of polygamy. He lived that way. He had a wife, but he also had a mistress for the rest of his life. It seemed to work for him. I don't know about his wife, though she too became a psychoanalyst and didn't leave him and was very productive. So who's to say that, even as a patient who became a lover, Sabina was in fact victimized? As it turns out, she was no victim. She was their intellectual equal and went on to have her own career.  
 

VW: Something I find especially intriguing about the film is the way that Jung and Spielrein seem to cross paths while on what are essentially reverse trajectories, the former moving from groundedness to deep disquiet, the latter from hysteria to groundedness. They share a peculiar kind of love story I think ...
DC: That's exactly right. A very good point ...

VW: Which makes me think that there are actually a surprising number of love stories in your work. The Dead Zone, The Fly and Dead Ringers are constructed to some degree around people falling in love. Crash and History of Violence prominently feature long-term love that needs to be renegotiated.
DC: When I was a kid I read a book called The Allegory of Love, by CS Lewis, which suggested that romantic love was a relatively recent literary invention. Whatever you want to call it, it does seem to be a very powerful force. And yes, I think it's in almost all my movies, though it's not often acknowledged, perhaps because it's very subtle.
 

VW: I'm interested in the question of restraint in A Dangerous Method. Most of your films depict catalytic events that allow some level of chaos to unfurl, but here—as in History of Violence, and perhaps Spider—taboo or heretical urges are only allowed to manifest in very particular safe zones. In this case, the zones of therapy or secret sex.
DC: Repression is interesting. In Freud's formula, civilization is repression. For me, each movie is a unique creature and tells you what it needs. In this case what it needed was control, because the era that psychoanalysis came out of was one of great control. You see it in the Belvedere Gardens, so beautiful yet so manicured—the boundaries were unmistakable. It was an era in which everyone knew his place. There was not a lot of fluidity. A lot of stability, but not much spontaneity. So the tone of the movie comes from the characters and the era, even the clothes, the high, stiff collars, and so on. Hysteria, we might say, was a spontaneous outcry against this general repression. Particularly of women.
 

VW: This is, obviously, an unusually talky movie. Much drama emerges through things spoken. That must be exhilarating in its own quiet way, to be able to craft a story in which the subconscious can be articulated without much contrivance.
DC: That was one of the attractions, absolutely. A lot of people say, "Wasn't it too talky? Too theatrical?" But it was a screenplay before it was a play, and even there, the characters talked a lot. It was called The Talking Cure. I liked that. I think Christopher was worried that I might want to cut back on that for so-called cinematic reasons, but I assured him that that was what makes this script great. A face talking is the thing that we photograph most as directors. To me that's not theatrical—it's the essence of cinema. If you have a great face saying great things, you have a movie. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus