It was Historical – A Dangerous Method
October 28, 2011 by pbenjay
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
In the opening scene of A Dangerous Method , we see a young woman screaming and fighting, desperately trying to escape the restraints of two men. The carriage pulls up to a large building set in the beautiful landscape of Switzerland and she is dragged into the psychiatric hospital of Dr. Carl Jung.
As the movie unfolds, we are witness to both the evolution of a burgeoning science as well as the growing relationship between Jung and Freud and Jung and Sabina (Keira Knightly). At times, it was difficult to discern if the movie was a drama about an illicit love affair, the inner turmoil wrought on a physician who crossed a line or a historical pseudo-documentary about the struggle to get psychiatry recognized as a viable means to cure mental illness.
When a movie can’t decide which genre it is, it’s usually in the purgatory between the two. I didn’t love the movie: It was slow-moving, quiet, and fairly dry. It’s not that I wanted to see psychotic scenes such as there was in the movie, Quills. No fortunately we were spared the fascination with excrement and masturbation.
In my opinion, the best part of the movie was watching Keira Knightly portray a severely mentally disturbed woman. Sabina’s illness manifested itself in violent bodily contortions, grinding teeth, chin jutted out, eyes rolling wildly. There have been some reviewers who called her performance over-the-top, however, I think Keira was extremely compelling. And as her treatment progressed, she deftly portrayed a woman emerging from the depths of despair and depression to an articulate student of psychiatry, only to become a renowned psychiatrist in her own right years later.
Viggo Mortensen played a somewhat arrogant Freud, stubborn and rigid in his beliefs, very well. Michael Fassbender portrayed the elegant Carl Jung equally as well.
If you like period movies, this one is shot accurately and beautifully. As for historical facts, we are allowed to peek into the lives of the two greatest psychiatrists of the 20th Century. Perhaps to add some spice to the movie (sex sells anything, they say), you also get to be a bit of a voyeur as the affair between Jung and Sabina plays out. Unfortunately or fortunately, the spice is not so much in the sex but in S&M foreplay. Not quite titillating enough to be steamy but replete with historical facts, the movie, overall, is somewhat entertaining and adds another dimension in David Cronenberg’s exploration of the human mind.
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Bill Ding and his band of clowns are the security patrol for this blog site. He is a favorite toy from the 50*s. By the way sometimes a blog is just an ego-maniacal stream of conscience.
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It was Historical – A Dangerous Method
October 28, 2011 by pbenjay
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
In the opening scene of A Dangerous Method , we see a young woman screaming and fighting, desperately trying to escape the restraints of two men. The carriage pulls up to a large building set in the beautiful landscape of Switzerland and she is dragged into the psychiatric hospital of Dr. Carl Jung.
As the movie unfolds, we are witness to both the evolution of a burgeoning science as well as the growing relationship between Jung and Freud and Jung and Sabina (Keira Knightly). At times, it was difficult to discern if the movie was a drama about an illicit love affair, the inner turmoil wrought on a physician who crossed a line or a historical pseudo-documentary about the struggle to get psychiatry recognized as a viable means to cure mental illness.
When a movie can’t decide which genre it is, it’s usually in the purgatory between the two. I didn’t love the movie: It was slow-moving, quiet, and fairly dry. It’s not that I wanted to see psychotic scenes such as there was in the movie, Quills. No fortunately we were spared the fascination with excrement and masturbation.
In my opinion, the best part of the movie was watching Keira Knightly portray a severely mentally disturbed woman. Sabina’s illness manifested itself in violent bodily contortions, grinding teeth, chin jutted out, eyes rolling wildly. There have been some reviewers who called her performance over-the-top, however, I think Keira was extremely compelling. And as her treatment progressed, she deftly portrayed a woman emerging from the depths of despair and depression to an articulate student of psychiatry, only to become a renowned psychiatrist in her own right years later.
Viggo Mortensen played a somewhat arrogant Freud, stubborn and rigid in his beliefs, very well. Michael Fassbender portrayed the elegant Carl Jung equally as well.
If you like period movies, this one is shot accurately and beautifully. As for historical facts, we are allowed to peek into the lives of the two greatest psychiatrists of the 20th Century. Perhaps to add some spice to the movie (sex sells anything, they say), you also get to be a bit of a voyeur as the affair between Jung and Sabina plays out. Unfortunately or fortunately, the spice is not so much in the sex but in S&M foreplay. Not quite titillating enough to be steamy but replete with historical facts, the movie, overall, is somewhat entertaining and adds another dimension in David Cronenberg’s exploration of the human mind.
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