A less than dangerous method of filmmaking - A Dangerous Method

David Cronenberg is not a director who makes ordinary films. In fact his films are often extraordinary both in subject and design. A Dangerous Method is the director’s most ordinary film to date. Even the miss-step that was M.Butterfly had a certain degree of sensual allure and ambiguity to it. With his latest film Cronenberg sets all his cards on the table from the off. To a certain extent the film was inevitable when looked at against the progression of Cronenberg’s career. From the visualisation of Nola Carveth’s rage in The Brood to the debate on the video nasty scare with Videodrome, the Canadian director is known for tackling themes of mutation, infection and identity and visualising his subject through exploding heads (Scanners), sexually transmitted slugs (Shivers) or stomach-vagina-VHS-players (Videodrome).  Over the years Cronenberg has taken on various forms of psychosis in increasingly literal ways most notably in A History of Violence and his most underrated film, Spider. A Dangerous Method is the most literal application of Cronenberg’s fascination with the mind and its machinations. The similarity with Spider is what makes A Dangerous Method’s greatest flaw all the more prevalent: Cronenberg’s inconsistent and misjudged direction. Much issue has been taken with Keira Knightly’s gurning, jaw-jutting performance of which Cronenberg assures were accurate symptons of the psychosis that Sabina suffered from. It is not so much her performance, which is by no means outstanding, that is the issue but rather the position she has in the film. Sabina is in the role that Cronenberg would have assigned to Brundelfly in The Fly or the mugwumps from Naked Lunch. Such characters were gruesome visualisations of the trauma that other or other versions of characters were going through. These were made up from special effects and prosthetics. As with something that is ostensibly a doll, the pain that they are going through can only be shown from the exterior. This is fine when you have Seth Brundle to flesh out the humanistic angle prior to the metamorphosis; however, Sabina is perpetually this figure within the film. She is the psychosis that the film revolves around rather than the character. This highlights what Cronenberg got so right in Spider and so wrong in A Dangerous Method: Ralph Fiennes performance is submerged and we feel the weight of his state of mind out of our insecurities of the character. This is impossible with Sabina as there is no room for interpretation and, yes, perhaps this is due to the fact that what we see of Sabina’s distress is more accurate than that of Spider’s but this is irrelevant if it is considerably less engaging. A Dangerous Method boils down to a period drama, a slice of history told with no inspiration or ingenuity. Cronenberg was rightly granted the ability of auteurist creative control after his commercial and artistic cross-over successes of the late 70’s and 80’s. He maintains this position though needs to reassure that he can still treat a subject with the same degree of ambiguity and brash imagination as captured so well in dozens of prior films and, perhaps, with his upcoming Cosmopolis, he will.