A Dangerous Method
Directed By: David
Cronenberg
Written By: Christopher
Hampton, based on his play The Talking Cure, adapted from the novel A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr
Starring: Michael
Fassbender, Viggo Mortenson, Kiera Knightly, and Vincent Cassell
Director of Photography: Peter Suschitzky, Editor: Ronald
Sanders, Production Designer: James McAteer, Original Music: Howard Shore
Rated: R for
psychoanalytical perversions
Read an interview with David Cronenberg, Christopher Hampton, and Michael Fassbender from the New York Film Festival
Cinema and psychoanalysis have a
long history together, as the new technology and the striking new school of thought
both began and evolved during the turn of the 20th century. And
since the 1970s, psychoanalysis has been used in film theory to explore cinema
in new light, where characters once thought to be crazy are instead explored
within their Freudian terms of wanting to return the womb or whatnot (Classic
Hollywood seems ripe with metaphors for sex looking back).
So what can we infer about the makers of psychoanalysis? That certainly sounds
like an interesting question for David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a stately and often involving piece on the
history of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, as well as the woman that changed
everything. On first appearances, Mr. Cronenberg, known for his more
graphically violent films from Videodrome
and A History of Violence, might seem like the wrong choice for this
imperial work from screenwriter Christopher Hampton (adapting his own play The Talking Cure, which was adapted from
the book A Most Dangerous Method by
John Kerr). But thematically, this is a work through and through by Mr.
Cronenberg, who explores how an idea, the psychological, can transform,
disfigure, and infect the body.
