When I interviewed David Cronenberg at The New Yorker Festival in October, he presented himself as a serene bourgeois artist—a mild Canadian who liked to observe the human comedy on the streets of his city (Toronto) or trek through the woods outside his house in the country. He refused to see himself as a man with obsessions, except for the desire to make as many movies as possible, which he has done, until recently, with repeated infusions of capital from the Canadian government.
What was comical about the event was that Cronenberg’s high-minded talk—he wants to “explore aspects of the human condition,” he said—was fitted around excerpts from his films that could be accurately described as spectacular, flesh-crawling (in a good way), erotic, and violent. There was James Woods kissing Debbie Harry as she protruded, all sweet and soft, from a TV set in “Videodrome.” Jeff Goldblum discoursing on insect politics as his body disintegrated in “The Fly.” Elias Koteas and Deborah Unger getting it on in the back seat of a car in the gear-shifting, automotive-arousal movie “Crash.” Viggo Mortensen, starkers, fighting off the knife-wielding assassins in the bathhouse in “Eastern Promises.” When I tried to press Cronenberg on what any of the fantastic goings-on in his movies had to do with him, he went into his mild-Canadian act. These weren’t his own obsessions, he said, they were variations on our common life. Whatever darkness lay below his urbane surface, he was not about to expose it on that occasion.
Cronenberg’s new movie, “A Dangerous Method,” based on a Christopher Hampton play, is the director’s explicit piece of work as a bourgeois artist. Of all Cronenberg’s movies, it has the most polished and cultivated appearance. It’s actually handsome, beautifully lit, easy on the eyes. This time, darkness, violence, desire have become matters to discuss calmly, and shown only in brief spasms. The movie is about the split between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Much of it is set in a posh psychiatric hospital outside Zurich, where Jung was working as a psychiatrist, before the First World War.
Dressed in a stiff collar sticking into his neck, Jung pays homage to Freud in Vienna, and Freud later returns the visit in Switzerland. Together they debate the politics of psychoanalysis, an endangered new therapy. Jung, the younger man, wants to investigate the spiritual and mystical side of life, and Freud, the rigid rationalist and atheist, insists that psychoanalysis will be discredited if it strays from science. Mortensen doesn’t do badly: ensconced in a neatly clipped beard and those clothes, he makes Freud wily, dominating, slightly unpleasant—a dictator in his own domain who sees every disagreement as a threat. As Jung, Fassbender, with a terrific moustache, is respectful, stern, and ready to explode. In effect, they discuss what Cronenberg has been doing his entire life as a moviemaker. If unlawful desires burst out of us, will it destroy our lives, destroy civilization? For Freud, of course, the answer is yes—that’s why our lives are tragic. Civilization is purchased at the price of repression, which we take out on ourselves. Jung isn’t so sure. There’s a slightly absurd element to all this placid theoretical discussion, but it’s not entirely dull—increasingly, the two men want to kill each other.
Back in the fancy clinic in Zurich, Jung’s most interesting patient is Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a hysteric with masochistic tendencies whom Jung cures, first with therapy and then with sex, thwacking her on her exposed rear and sleeping with her. So letting out those desires may not be a bad thing—Spielrein (a real person, who eventually became a shrink herself, in Russia), is the proof of it. Thrusting out her jaw, clenched and shaking, swallowing most of her words and speaking in gasps, Knightley goes all the way with convulsive emotionalism and shame and ravenous desire. She’s hungry, all right. She gives a brave, terrible performance, but the movie would have been just too tame without her. Cronenberg has found the forum for what interests him, but it’s not an artistic solution, it’s a thematic solution. I would stick with “The Fly” and “Dead Ringers” and “Crash,” where he lets his own fantasies (which, of course, have nothing to do with him) the full freedom on screen to create and destroy everything in their path.
