Dir. David Cronenberg, 2011
This should be a gripping, dramatic story. A gifted psychotherapist; a beautiful, brilliant, but psychically scarred patient; an illicit love-affair; sexual perversion; and a deeply intellectual and viscerally father-son conflict between the two defining figures of psychotherapy that resonates to this day.
Yet it leaves you surprisingly cold. The characters are ultimately not likeable or those you could care about. Jung seems frigid and ironically out of touch with his own feelings; his patient seems spoilt (and overacted by Keira Knightley); and Freud seems like an ossified, obstinate, pomposity. The protagonist is Jung, played with great finesse by Michael Fassbender, but it seems all technique and no heart. And the Jung/Freud debate is ultimately just a side-show.
Any one of the major plot elements could have been used as a way to pry open the hearts and minds of these people, and their repressed fears, rages and perversions -- and hence ours. Instead the film becomes a hodge-podge of sentimentality, pretension, and costume drama.
Feb 2012
2*
This should be a gripping, dramatic story. A gifted psychotherapist; a beautiful, brilliant, but psychically scarred patient; an illicit love-affair; sexual perversion; and a deeply intellectual and viscerally father-son conflict between the two defining figures of psychotherapy that resonates to this day.
Yet it leaves you surprisingly cold. The characters are ultimately not likeable or those you could care about. Jung seems frigid and ironically out of touch with his own feelings; his patient seems spoilt (and overacted by Keira Knightley); and Freud seems like an ossified, obstinate, pomposity. The protagonist is Jung, played with great finesse by Michael Fassbender, but it seems all technique and no heart. And the Jung/Freud debate is ultimately just a side-show.
Any one of the major plot elements could have been used as a way to pry open the hearts and minds of these people, and their repressed fears, rages and perversions -- and hence ours. Instead the film becomes a hodge-podge of sentimentality, pretension, and costume drama.
Feb 2012
2*
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