Great concept with fabolous actors fails to fulfill it's full potential.
C.G. Jung is treating a woman with a serious emotional problems.
She likes to be spanked. Of course, an affair ensues. At the same time Jung is forming a friendship/rivalry with Sigmund Freud. Lovely ideas and debates about the basic ideal differences of psychoanalysis and man's sexual self gets lost somewhere between the spanking and beautiful shots of summerly Vienna.
Absolutely fabolous and the treat & the saving grace of the film is C.G. Jung played by Michael Fassbender. His restricted manner shows a portrait of a man with great inner turmoil. Keira Knightley as the spanking Ms. Spielrein, who by the way was to become one of the first women psychoanalysists later in Russia, is ruining the potrayal of this fisty and intelligent woman with overacting and too heavy Russian accent. Also much can be debated about the fact that Freud & Jung are portrayed as having a upper class brit accent.
Vincent Cassel makes a lovely little visit as Otto Gross, who was the early disciple of Sigmund Freud amd psychoanalytist himself. Viggo Mortensen's potrayal of Sigmund Freud reminds more like an old english fatherly business tycoon of the 21th century than an austrian psychoanalytist.
Should David Cronenberg stick to horror isn't a valid point either, as Eastern Promises goes to show but he isn't on his best with this film either. Maybe at it's best, A Dangerous Method makes people to explore deeper to the lives and thoughts of these two mavericks of their time.
