‘Method’ is dangerously dull

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Maybe it was bad timing that acclaimed director David Cronenberg released the eye-popping trailer for his upcoming young billionaire-in-crisis Manhattan madness film Cosmopolis just a few days before I was finally able to see A Dangerous Method. After being blindsided and flipped upside down by that clip—is that really the Twilight guy in an intellectually challenging role?— I was completely underwhelmed by what I thought should have been a rich, cerebral period film.

Set on the eve of WWI, Method follows Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung as he strives to make a name for himself in his field by developing ways to not only identity patients’ problems but to give them a legitimate hope of recovery.

Played by Michael Fassbender, Jung’s optimism puts him at odds with his more cynical mentor, Sigmund Freud, embodied by a calculating Viggo Mortensen. When Jung grows too close to a troubled Russian patient, she begins to show interest in psychology herself, and Jung’s devotion to his wife and his mentor are put to the test.

Fassbender is fine in his quiet, buttoned-up lead role. But he isn’t given much to do but pontificate frustratingly. It is Mortensen who is best cast, but bizarrely underused as Freud. Despite several lengthy passages of verbal sparring with each other, Jung and Freud never really catch fire. It’s all academic. Mortensen in particular never loses his cool. It’s unnerving. You want someone to shout, kick something over, punch someone. Anything.

The film’s best scene is about 15 minutes in when Jung is analyzing his wife with and his Russian patient and future muse observing in he room. It’s quiet, intense and loaded with subtext—an attribute the rest of this film could have used in spades. It’s all downhill from there, and what is only a 100 minute movie feels more like three hours.

The least “Cronenbergian” of any of his films, A Dangerous Method feels like coasting. In fact, it is hard to detect any personality on the screen at all—save for Keira Knightly’s embarrassingly over-the-top turn as the Russian patient.

With the mighty elements at his disposal with this story—the battle of wits and wills between the twin titans of modern psychology—Cronenberg fails. It’s as if the gods of cinema handed Cronenberg hydrogen and oxygen as building blocks, and he only managed to produce a tepid puddle.