2-2-2012 Movie Review: A Dangerous Method

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Viewers of A Dangerous Method are herby urged to look into the John Kerr nonfiction book about the competition between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud over theories of psychoanalysis and the disturbed but brilliant woman who came between them, because there is more to their story than any normal-length movie can even suggest. But A Dangerous Method present Viggo Mortenson as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung and Keira Knightley as the woman in top form, and has fascinating things to say about psychoanalysis and whether it is a science at all, still a controversy as of 1993, when Kerr’s book was published. Among other things Jung believed that limiting psychoanalytic study to what could be rationally proved was leaving out a great vista of life, like for instance love itself, while Freud insisted that it was science and we had to live with the limitations that involved. Relations between Fassbender and Knightley get downright kinky as well as dubiously ethical, risking the careers of all three, and they are by no means all the peculiar and apparently historically accurate characterizations in the movie.

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A Dangerous Method refuses to simplify things to the point of melodrama and in doing so risks a lack of clarity which perhaps suits the unclarity of the study its characters are involved in, but it also presents its facts in conversations held at such murmurous levels – and this is clearly intended, not a matter of the volume set too low – as to make it difficult to hear the all-important dialogue: hope for a very quiet movie audience, because higher volume would sound freakish. But your attention will be well rewarded.