A Dangerous Method

In the second part of Chilean author Roberto Bolano’s masterful 2666, a university professor named Oscar Amalfitano stumbles into insanity as a result of his search for, and supposed discovery of, order in places where there is none.

Like most other great portrayals of the insane, 2666 succeeds for a specific reason: depictions of the insane that are characterized only by “weirdness” are nothing more than freak shows and cheap tricks, focusing wholly on their degrees of aberration from the normal. Effective illustrations like Bolano’s rely instead on insanity as a different breed of normal unto itself, and whose afflicted’s ill-suitedness to traditional thinking and interpretation is omitted in favor of glimpses into alternative psychological landscapes. What is moving to us is not that these individuals don’t see things the way we do, but that their logic, though it seems foreign, is aggressively consistent in its self-governance. We get a sense that the chaos we witness is, in fact, highly ordered, though the mechanism according to which it operates remains hidden.

On one hand, it is difficult to say A Dangerous Method fails to pull off this impressive and deeply affecting technique, but only because the film makes almost no attempt to do so. It is as though director David Cronenberg simply told lead actress Keira Knightley, who plays the at-first psychotic and then pretentious psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, to act like a crazy person. And Knightley does, screaming and wading into pools and speaking in sentences that make no sense. She assumes her most antic disposition and acts as far away from normal as possible. In doing so, however, she betrays the effect she is trying to create; she comes off as a sane person acting crazy, rather than a crazy person who believes herself sane. One of the most genuinely intriguing elements of the great books and films that depict the insane is the sheer normality with which those characters view their own behavior. Knightley fails to capture this, and the film suffers as a result.

The thorough sidelining of this insight, especially as it relates to a film that is ostensibly about Sigmund Freud himself, is problematic when one observes that the idea was at the heart of the man’s 1919 The Uncanny, a work that inspired much fiction concerning the surreal, the insane and the asylum. But the film has other flaws, too, and its pleasing aesthetic and technically sound execution are not enough to save it. The script is dull and, at times, humorously melodramatic; apparently, the pretensions of psychoanalytic shop talk don’t well translate to the big screen in 2012. It’s all the more difficult to deal with once filtered through Knightley’s absolutely preposterous attempt at a Russian accent. Lastly, and perhaps most disappointingly, the film feels cold but not cerebral; passionless but not calculated. It is something like a John Frusciante guitar solo, and all the technical skill in the world can’t save it from its own lack of substance.

—Chris Bassil