Click through the link for Taubin’s review. I found one of Taubin’s suggestions particularly invigorating, that David Cronenberg’s use of a wide-angle lens—which makes the character in the foreground disproportionately larger than the character in the background—here reveals the intense subjectivity with which a psychoanalyst comprehends a patient. In a film where seemingly every character is analyzing every other, the effect is mesmerizing. And Taubin’s admittance of the film’s “almost comical” approach to dramatizing the giants of psychoanalysis has allowed me to embrace the hilarious moments of the film with less hesitance. For Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud in particular, I felt oddly and poignantly giddy watching the unfolding tragedy of characters who attempt professionally to capture the essential gestures of human nature but cannot personally perceive their own foibles.

Taubin initially acknowledges the writer Christopher Hampton, who adapted the script from his play The Talking Cure, but then bizarrely and erroneously attributes the film’s premise and “comical directness” directly to Cronenberg. But in spite of Taubin’s auteristic eagerness to pronounce the movie “David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method“—an unfortunately common tendency with critics attuned to writer-directors—I more than agree with her conclusion: “This is a major film, for sure.”

The five key actors (Fassbender, Knightley, Mortensen, Cassel, and Gadon) are all extraordinary, and I would predict, with a hope to emulate Jung’s dreamlike visions into the future, that the film will be known for the unrivalled quality of its performances. Helped along by full scenes of dialogue bare and direct enough to give the actors rich areas to delve into headlong for themselves, Fassbender and Mortensen in particular find magnificence in pauses and modulations. I could not help but recall the more theatrical melodramatic films of American cinema in the forties, when playwrights-as-screenwriters were undaunted by dialogue and actors had a chance to let their performances breathe. Knightley manages feats of pathos with a few stutters and a shocking physical performance, Gadon (who plays Jung’s wife Emma) shattered me with her diminutive voice and her infinitesimal expressions, and Cassel works his weary face like a Dionysian mask, motionless but brimming with wilderness underneath. Fassbender, of course, is given the bulk of the screen time, and his piercing ability to convey innermost thoughts in the wavers of his brows and the glints in his eye still remain a pleasurable mystery. 

Cronenberg’s atypically consistent use of bright, natural light and blue skies draws out the significance of the darker moments: in a dim room, Jung (Michael Fassbender) gives his wife a word-association test that threatens to expose their unacknowledged dysfunction; during a first nighttime scene, Freud first articulates Jung’s sexual obsession with his patient Sabina (Keira Knightley); during the next nighttime scene, the wayward psychoanalyst Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) directly encourages Jung to sleep with Sabina. In each case, Jung considers but refuses to openly express his hidden desires. And when Jung finally succumbs and approaches Sabina at her apartment, the day is turning into night—his hidden desires are taking over his reality, Cronenberg’s brilliant but repressive daylight. It is an intriguing inversion of light’s traditional meaning, that for A Dangerous Method the light evokes artifice and Jung’s fear of being seen for who he really is, even by himself.

The next two nighttime scenes draw out Jung’s second-most prominent repression, his desire to overtake Freud. In the first, Jung relates a dream Freud interprets as expressing this desire (again, Freud first articulates Jung’s repression through a dream); in the second and final nighttime scene, Jung expresses his conviction that Freud is not worthy of his paternal superiority directly in a letter. So Jung does admit his desires but does not seem materially to change throughout the film—he is not cured, and his indulgence of his repressions does not seem to allow him to move beyond them with any lasting conviction. Jung’s insights border—and sometimes pass the border—of prognostication. “What I’ll never accept is that what we understand has got us nowhere,” Jung says in one of the final scenes, as he gazes out onto a sunlit lake. It is an intriguing hallmark the protagonists Cronenberg has recently explored—his last four, at least it seems to me—that they change little, but rather are gradually revealed to the audience until in the final moment they appear still mysterious, but intricately so. In A Dangerous Method, Jung is revealed also to himself, and what change occurs is one of revelation, not alteration. The last shot of A Dangerous Method (see below) immediately recalls similar final shots from Eastern Promises and History of Violence, in which the protagonists played by Viggo Mortensen sit silently, uncertain of their futures but unfolded for us like dangerous flowers in bloom. 

I wonder if these characters are as truly trapped as they seem. Perhaps Cronenberg has sought ought these crystallizations of humanity because their static nature allows him to meditate on their intricacies. Are they dramatic or merely photographs? Either way, A Dangerous Method offers up a rich portrait.