Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

This is a movie about intelligent people who are trying to elevate their guesses about human nature to the level of a new science. But the fact that they are intelligent doesn't turn their guesses into objective truth, or cause them to become wise, or make them into role models.Let me stop here and say that frankly this is a difficult movie to review partly because it really doesn't conform to expectations. Not that it should. On the one hand these (Jung, Freud, Spielrein, Otto Gross) are people dealing with their own desires for sexuality, power, freedom from social restraint, and so on. On the other hand they are trying to turn their personal insights or ideas into scientific dogmas. On a third hand they are trying to argue about these dogmas with each other while engaging in sex and in power games with each other, so you see people on the screen whose bodies are interacting on a physical level while at the same time carrying on a running intellectualized commentary and discussion on themselves. This is somewhat disconcerting to watch and could easily be developed into a comedic sketch.Another issue for the moviegoer is that the insights of the early psychoanalysts haven't exactly stood up to the inquiries of modern science the way Einstein's theories have. From the modern standpoint - well, mine anyway - the arguments between Spielrein and Freud and Jung about (say) whether the sex instinct is creative or whether it must incorporate the death instinct and embody destruction of the individual ego (more or less) seem to be really a lot like religious arguments in the early Christian church about whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father or not. There are no testable hypotheses, no material referents, just talk. Now, I'm not claiming that the seekers in question are made out to be hypocrites. They are at least somewhat sincere - even Gross, who claims that psychological health is to have as much sex and as little moral restraint as possible. And they aren't charlatans. Spielrein comes to Jung as his patient in a horrible mental state; through his "talking cure" she becomes a respected professional. Of course he also gets into a sexual affair with her. But to be fair psychiatric ethics didn't exist yet, and this is Vienna circa 1906, when professional men like Jung have wives and children and also mistresses apparently as a matter of course, so it's not reasonable to castigate Jung as some kind of exploitative monster towards his patient and towards his wife without mentioning that it was a monstrous time and a monstrous world. It's not as if the camera isn't critical of him.Still, it's fair to say that no matter how sincere they think they are, they are all rationalizing and fooling themselves to some degree, though not so much each other. Freud, for example, who at one point calmly declares that of course he bears no ill will to Jung, he merely can't support Jung's stupid primitive religious idiotic nonsense, or words to that effect. Things like that are interesting and worth seeing the movie for, and the performances are pretty seamless - I really have to put in a shout out to Sarah Gadon who plays Emma Jung with great delicacy. But if you want dramatic progression or a third-act climax (SPOILER) you really won't get any. They go their ways and ultimately you get biographical notes before the end credits. But on the plus side a few days later you may start thinking about issues raised in the film, like, were these people just successful neurotics, or were they intuitive helpers but failures at creating a science, or was their science more successful than that, or were they really sort of like founders of a religion after all? So I'm glad I saw it.

A DANGEROUS METHOD David Cronenberg moves from body horror to mental dangers in this intelligent and handsomely mounted production of a tale from the early history of psychiatry: the relationships between Sigmund Freud, played by Viggo Mortenson, Carl Jung, played by Michael Fassbender, and two of the forgotten people of early psychoanalysis, Sabine Speilrein, Keira Knightley, and Otto Gross, Vincent Cassel.The film imagines a love affair between Carl Jung and one of his patients, Sabine Spielrein, a woman who went on to become an important psychiatrist in her own right. Spielrein's case prompted Jung to contact Sigmund Freud in 1906 for insights into treating her, beginning the relationship between Jung and Freud which lasted until their split in 1914.Relationships are at the centre of the movie. As well as Spielrein and Jung, there are those between Jung and Freud, between Jung and his wife, between Spielrein and Freud, and, most subtly, between Jung and Otto Gross, sent to Jung by Freud for treatment but who ends up influencing Jung into a very different world-view, one which sends him straight into the arms of Sabine Spielrein and some very unorthodox treatment.The film begins with a burst of action as Sabine Spielrein is dumped at the Burgholzi clinic in Switzerland in 1904 and taken as a patient by the newly-qualified Dr Carl Jung. She was diagnosed by Jung as a psychotic hysteric and Keira Knightley's depiction of this state is pretty close to Jung's initial notes, using her own physicality to describe Spielrein's derangement. Her condition improves but that unstable, twitchy dimension is always there as Keira Knightley keeps her on the edge right to the end.Michael Fassbender plays Jung as the polar opposite of Spielrein. Jung is calm, good-natured, kindly, and thoroughly decent even when he's having his affair with her or falling out with Freud. There's an attractive, genuine quality in Fassbender that makes him the stable centre of the film.The other great relationship in the film is between Freud and Jung. Viggo Mortensen's Freud is obsessed with protecting psychoanalysis from its enemies, sizing up Jung as a potential successor yet careful to maintain his own status as head of the clan. There's a dry wit in his performance along with an honesty about Freud's less appealing side, such as his chagrin at Jung's wealthy wife that lets us see Freud as human, all too human - a great but difficult man caught up in the dilemma of looking for a crown prince then, when he finds one, driving him into exile.The arrival of Otto Gross propels the film forward and provides Jung with the impetus, or the excuse, to start an affair with Sabine Spielrein. Gross is the chaos factor, breaking the stalemate between Spielrein's desire for Jung and Jung's staid conservatism and professionalism. Vincent Cassel plays Otto Gross as neurotic, shallow, insightful and obsessive, going through one sexual experience after another in search of Experience, permanently unhappy. He rejected Freud's idea of repression as a necessity for civilised behaviour, insisting on the immediacy of experience as negating the need for analysis, and challenging Jung at every step to do the obvious thing and have an affair with Sabine. It's an intelligent portrayal by Cassel, emphasising the mental and emotional distance between himself and Freud and Jung and condemning their inability to help him or, in his opinion, themselves. When he climbs over a wall and heads off to his tragic fate, of poverty and death, he is walking away from the possibility of psychiatry itself.The urgency and sense of panic in his early horror classics are long gone for Cronenberg. A Dangerous Method has a slow, regular pace and some scenes have an almost painterly quality, aided by some great digital matte backgrounds. Scenes are carefully composed with soft focus around the edges of facial shots keeping our attention on the middle of the frame. Outdoor scenes have people slowly promenading in the background along riversides or in parks, adding life and motion and giving a depth to the world.Deep inside the end credits it says "This film is based on true events, but certain scenes, especially those in the private sphere, are of a speculative nature". The mix of fact and speculation has produced a consistent story thanks to Cronenberg's tight focus on characters who are brought to life by great actors in a film of pristine production values and beautiful music. In a way this mirrors the dangerous and optimistic offer of psychoanalysis: to mix the known and unknown in consciousness and produce a better, more consistent human being.

After all the positive reviews, I had high hopes for this movie, but found myself very distracted. I love to be engaged in a story and kept hoping I would be, but I finally gave up, which is rare for me. I expected something far more intelligent and interesting. The acting was fine, but the content was pedestrian, more like a bad TV movie than an actual cinema piece. Seems Keira felt this and worked harder than anyone to make this a decent film, but her effort, while appreciated, was in vane. Worst of all is the horrific green screen, looks like something from the 70's. Very disappointed, this movie could have been so much more.

While being thrilled to Cronenberg's upcoming MAPS TO THE STARS, which will debut in Cannes this year in the main competition, it is an apposite time to visit his other work which escaped my watch list although COSMOPOLIS (2012, 4/10) is a fiasco which quite disheartens my faith, luckily, A DANGEROUS METHOD is surprisingly robust in depicting a historical love affair between one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, Doctor Carl Yung (Fassbender) and his Russian patient Sabina Spielrein (Knightley), at the dawn of 20th Century, at the same time, the film also probes into Yung's correspondence with Sigmund Freud (Mortensen), how their assumed mentor-and-next-in-line rapport disintegrates in the wake of their diversified convictions in the professional field. The film dedicatedly shuns away from being a hagiography, neither for Yung nor for Freud, their highly dialectical discourse is stingingly gripping, Freud avers all neurosis is of exclusively sexual origin while Yung champions parapsychology, plus Vincent Cassel, has a small role as the more unorthodox psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who is a game-changer in Jung's world-view when he attempts to analyze Gross. Words are not verbose anymore, in psychotherapy, it is the most or maybe only effective means to divulge what's hidden inside the labyrinthine mind, Fassbender and Mortensen are conspicuously excellent in their two-handers, the former often blinks rapidly as if he tries to convey his ideas through an impregnable wall erected by the latter, who never loses his composure and is indomitable to any rebuttal. This film is not at all Cronenberg-esque, it is a straightforward drama, the only remotely grotesque scenes are Keira Knightley's distorted effort to mimic a patient under hysteria, she is gutsy and to say the least, all-out for a difficult role involves with sadomasochism, anal fixation and insanity, I'm not a naysayer in her performance, on the contrary, she barely misses my top 10 list of leading actress in 2011, the sexual tension between Sabina and Dr. Yung is unforced, although as unlikely as an ace among his peers, Dr. Yung would make such a blunder at the first place to fall for his patient, he has his secrets too, a libido-driven temptation is too hard to reject, the pleasure which Sabina offers cannot be achieved from his melancholic wife Emma (an underplayed Sarah Gadon), eventually he becomes a monogamy dissenter as Otto has advised. A DANGEROUS METHOD inclines to be an actor's playground rather than Cronenberg's auteurist endeavor, stemming from my self-satisfying purpose, I hope MAPS TO THE STARS will be another vehicle for its A-list cast, in the main for my goddess Moore, who can return to the brutal Oscar battle in an age when most actress are regressing to sideline offers. Maybe Cronenberg is the right turn this time.