Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar — it can also symbolize your unresolved daddy issues and the fact that you like getting spanked.
So it goes in “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s compelling and exasperating look at the relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and the beautiful patient (Keira Knightley) who came between them.
The characters debate and philosphize in a series of conversations, the movie implies, that paved the way for modern psychoanalysis. Yet despite such ripe material, “A Dangerous Method” feels underpowered and bloodless; it’s more hot air than steamy fun.
Part of this may be the fault of the source material: “A Dangerous Method” is based on a play called “The Talking Cure,” by Christopher Hampton (“Dangerous Liaisons”), which was based on a nonfiction book, “A Most Dangerous Method,” by John Carr. In adapting the play, Hampton doesn’t seem to have done much with it.
Knightley’s deranged, hypersexualized Sabine Spielrein turns up on Jung’s doorstep for treatment, which prompts him to seek out the guidance of his idol Freud. The story unfolds as a series of dialogue-heavy exchanges between the characters set in a series of tastefully decorated rooms.
What’s frustrating is that Cronenberg — who has so fearlessly explored crises of the flesh in movies like “The Fly,” “Dead Ringers” and “Naked Lunch” — would seem to be the perfect filmmaker to strip away the decorum and find the beating heart of this story.
But save for a few spiritedly naughty moments, “A Dangerous Method” remains as buttoned-up as Jung’s shirt collar.
Nor is it ever especially clear where the center of the drama is located: Is it the rivalry between Jung and Freud? The lust that flowers between Sabina and Jung? Or Jung’s internal struggle to reconcile intellectual theories with base impulses?
That “A Dangerous Method” is worth seeing is due almost entirely to Knightley’s sputtering, jaw-jutted-out performance
She almost literally acts rings around the passable, but unexciting Mortensen and Fassbender, and she alone seems to grasp what the film might have been — a study of our ongoing struggle to hold it all together, even if we sometimes just want to let it rip.
