A Dangerous Method (2011)

The fatal flaw of the movies is their inability to represent the mental realm; a history of film might be a history of all of the magic tricks that film deploys in order surrmount this. The novel, for all its 19th century inertia, nevertheless is able, yet still, to represent interiority in ways that film cannot. One might read Freud as one who reappropriated the psychic ability of the novel (exteriorizing the interior) and reintroduced it into the clinic; in this way psychoanalysis can be said to be a literary science. So it is perhaps with little surprise that Kiera Knightley’s jutting chin as representation of psychosis does not come off; and yet that Sabina Spielrein, the tragic and typically uncredited co-discoverer of psychoanalysis and the death-drive, is represented here at all is to the good. Despite the clunkiness, the movie is sustained by the other films in the Cronenberg canon and all of their open wounds, car crashes, human flies and flaps of skin are here encased implicitly in the minds of Freud, Jung and Spielrein and this, I think, works. Still the film cannot transcend its genre, and Viggo Mortensen, who is marked forever as Strider from Lord of the Rings, can’t be taken seriously; has Freud ever been this dopy? The real Freud was gifted with such photogenic power that it seems as if the entirety of psychoanalytic insight lies within that hard and canny gaze; sometimes a photograph can be far superior to any film.