Michael Fassbender has been on movie screens everywhere, it seems, playing a variety of characters and handling all of them very well. "A Dangerous Method," in which he portrays Carl Jung, "Haywire," an action flick, and "Shame," in which he's a cold sex addict, all open here today. ("Shame" will be the next review.) They bring to five the number of 2011 films in which he was prominent, including starring roles in "X-Men: First Class," and "Jane Eyre."
His breakout role came three years ago in "Inglorious Basterds," and he got a lot of very good notices when he portrayed Bobby Sands, the Irish revolutionary who starved himself to death, in "Hunger," in 2008. The 34-year-old actor was born in Germany to an Irish mother and a German father, grew up in Ireland and currently works out of London.
With Fassbender as Jung, Viggo Mortensen as a marvelous, very human Freud, and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, as complex and sexual a woman as the screen can show, "A Dangerous Method" highlights two things — talking and making love — that humans can do exceptionally well, and David Cronenberg's direction keeps ears and eyes riveted to the screen.
The first scene sets a strong tone as Spielrein, riding in a carriage to a mental hospital in Switzerland in the first decade of the 20th century, has a world-class temper tantrum. It's staggeringly powerful, and it sets up the young woman as a power to be reckoned with. She's to be treated by Jung, and she travels from patient to lover to peer in a series of brilliant scenes that show both Knightley and Fassbender as fierce performers on the screen.
And it's interesting that Fassbender, who plays sex addict (bad term, but it works) in "Shame," is involved with far more sensuality and the fanning of sexual appetites as he and Knightley go at it in "A Dangerous Method." Spielrein, a real person whose intellectual interaction with Freud is as powerful as her physical one with Jung, became a psychoanalyst in her native Russia and was murdered by German soldiers in the early days of World War II.
Cronenberg's direction is powerful, too, working from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, adapted from his play, "The Talking Cure," based on a novel by John Kerr. Outstanding writing and direction make this a natural for fine actors, and Mortensen gleams like a rare gem as Freud, bringing him a delightful sense of humor. Jung treats Spielrein, who sits on a couch as one of the first people to undergo "psychanalysis," as Jung calls it. Freud convinces him to add an 'o,' turning it into the "psychoanalysis" we call it today.
The two men, Freud as the mentor, have a wonderful relationship, and hearing them talk as they walk in a series of beautifully-manicured gardens, is exciting. There's also fine acting from Sarah Gadon as Jung's wife, Emma, but exciting work from Fassbender, who is having Spielrein on the side, as it were, and Mortensen, as the man who may have been the 20th century's most famous — certainly its most quoted — physician.
A Dangerous Method opens today at several theaters
— Joe