A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

David Cronenberg throws the audience for a loop from the start of A Dangerous Method. The stately opening credits, unfolding gracefully over close-ups of ink blotting the pages of correspondence, is so elegant that it cannot even be taken for a sort of proto-Rorschach test. It is as conventional and soft a commencement to a costume drama as credits can be. Then, Cronenberg cuts straight to a shot of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) shrieking, cackling and hissing against the glass, resembling less her usual, composed and corseted ladies than Jane Eyre's Bertha, the embodiment of the repressed female id. In an instant, the director pushes under the "proper" surface of the period drama to confront its twisted secrets. The fact that most of the film occurs in bright daylight is no coincidence; the monsters that eat at these characters are not creatures that come out in the night. They are in all of us at all times, whether they're visible or not.

Cronenberg's style has always been formal, but A Dangerous Method is so classically composed that a newcomer would never guess its maker had also directed such body horror classics as Videodrome and Crash. Yet by placing Sabina's "hysteria" upfront, the director clues us in on his basic aim: the film is merely the psychological root of his horror movies. As Knightley writhes around in mental agony, Cronenberg fully subsumes his tumorous grotesqueries fully into the mind, which can torment the body well enough without tumorous growths or other icky, hyperbolic infections. As Glenn Kenny rightly put it on Twitter shortly after the film's premiere, Sabina, and her sexuality, is the traditional monster in a typical Cronenberg film.

Taken to the Burghölzli clinic outside Zurich, Sabina is placed under the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbener), then the assistant to the hospital's director. Jung decides to treat Sabina with the "talking cure," a theory developed by Sigmund Freud but potentially never applied to a patient. Sabina's case will eventually bring Jung into contact with his idol and, for various reasons, help tear them apart. Their interaction, along with Jung's increasingly unethical relationship with Sabina, subtly brings out the theories of both psychiatrists, even as the director gradually reveals that the doctors themselves embody these same prototypical ideas about the workings of the human mind.

Viggo Mortensen plays Freud with such paternalism that he casts himself as the Oedipal father to be destroyed by Jung, something that the Austrian even voices aloud later in the film. Freud looks to Jung as a potential successor but urges the man to stop bringing "mysticism" into psychoanalysis just as the field is finally beginning to be accepted by the scientific community at large. But Freud's anti-religious streak has a clear personal impetus: he confides in Jung that the Jewish identity of the Viennese psychoanalysts will make the struggle to be taken seriously that much harder. A confused Jung asked why that would matter, to which Freud dryly responds, "That, if I may say so, is an exquisitely Protestant remark." Jung comes to resent what he perceives to be Freud's close-mindedness on this issue,  but Freud's little jab has a point. Not that the man can't be unreasonable: having to support a wife and six children on a modest income, Freud casts petty sideways glances at the wealth into which Jung married, tacitly sniping the opulent house and travel conditions the Swiss doctor enjoys.

Sabina's own mental state is more explicitly revealed through Knightley's performance. Her bony, angular frame is perfect for Spielrein's wracked, involuntarily self-punishment, her uncontrollable sex drive clashing with her virginity until it seems as if her body thrashes in such fits because that drive is looking for an alternate escape. (The blood of her broken hymen shown later in some ways seems like the remains of some felled mythical beast, or at the very least the opening of a release valve.) She exhibits the animus, the male within the female, when she takes the initiative in kissing Jung, and it's amusing that the progressive psychiatrist would take the all too traditionally male excuse of subsequently blaming her for "seducing" him. Later, Sabina finds herself directly and indirectly trapped between Jung and Freud when she becomes a psychiatrist in her own right and must write her own dissertation with the divergent theorists' views. Her heart favors Jung, but her head tends to side with Freud, who at one point conspiratorially tells the Russian Jewish Spielrein of Jung, "Put not your trust in Aryans," asking for her allegiance out of the same religious identity he buries in public.

Cronenberg uses split diopter lenses to crush characters against each other while still emphasizing distance. It makes Jung, Freud and Spielrein into each other's dualities, even their shoulder angels. It also has the effect of making every bit of dialogue resemble the setup for Jung's approach to Freud's talking cure with Sabina, in which he places the woman looking forward as he sits behind asking questions for minimal distraction. This turns every conversation into a therapy session, which somewhat resembles a Catholic confession, a wry twist given Freud's overt objection to religious influence in his scientific approach.

Long, generally static takes drag out these forms of therapy to excruciating lengths. When Sabina finally voices what it is that torments her, Cronenberg lingers on Knightley's face, horrified at herself for speaking aloud her demons. Indeed, it can be harder to watch her come clean about her sexual hangups than it is to see Seth Brundle catalog his own rotted-off body parts in The Fly; at times, Cronenberg moves in so close and refuses to cut for so long that my eyes darted every which way but toward the screen in sheer discomfort. But that's the point; Knightley, aghast at herself for revealing her kinks, is not so different from people today, who continue to hold such open conversation about sex taboo a century later. By breaking through the social barriers that cage her, Sabina is set on the path to recovery. As utterly agonizing as it can be, opening up can be healthy, and sometimes talking really can be a cure.

There are jokes sprinkled throughout A Dangerous Method—Freud in particular is wry and witty, and he is always seen with a cigar in hand or mouth—but the film has an air of quiet tragedy to it, the important breakthroughs made by Jung, Freud, even Spielrein (her dissertation on the links between sex and death almost certainly influenced some of the two men's later theories) nevertheless unable to fully overcome their fears and desires. Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), the brief prodigy of Freud, advises Jung "Never repress anything," but as the closing text of the film reveals, he'll die penniless and hungry by the end of the decade. That places Otto at one extreme, and the totally inhibited Sabina of the film's beginning at the other. But the medium between the two, Freud's assertion of a necessary level of repression, is anything but a happy one. A Dangerous Method closes with Jung sitting in empty social comfort, paying a dear psychic price for that normalcy, the full extent of which is borne out with the revelation of his subsequent breakdown. We also learn that Freud had good reason to worry about his ethnic and religious identity, him being kicked out of Vienna in 1939 and Spielrein murdered by the SS in 1942. The sense of barely suppressed pain and sorrow that ends the film is only worsened by these intertitles, making for one of the most tragic of Cronenberg's films. But there is hope for the future: as Jung's expositional title card notes, the same nervous breakdown that incapacitates him during the First World War will only make him emerge a stronger psychiatrist. As he says to the equally troubled but accomplished psychoanalyst Sabina has become by the end, "Only the wounded physician heals."

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Michael Fassbender only just exploded on the international scene a few years ago, but to see him in Shame, one half expects him to keel over any second. After coming to everyone's attention as the physically emaciated IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's debut Hunger, Fassbender re-teams with the director to play a spiritually hollowed figure. The soullessness of sex addict Brandon pokes through the actor's buff frame, turning his pale flesh gray, his lined face turned skeletal with self-consuming lust. It is a deeply unsettling performance, one that uses Fassbender's attractive physicality and body language against itself to make every seductive pose more predatory than smoldering.

McQueen and editor Joe Walker establish the prison Brandon has erected around himself with a circular opening defined by the harsh sounds of a light switch turned on after nights of carnal pleasures, the disgusted whipping back of blinds to let in the light of the world from which Brandon hides, and the grinding subway train where he scopes out potential conquests on his way to work. As he hungrily gazes upon a married woman who struggles vainly against his devilish spell, the audience sees Brandon's routine of sex, be it hiring prostitutes, watching Internet porn or masturbating at work. So effective is the opening that mere wisps of recurring images—such as the bathroom door at work—instantly trigger graphic memories. But that closed-loop cutting only locks the film itself into the icy bourgeois surroundings of its protagonist, allowing McQueen to show off without having to do anything with his technical skill.

In no time, the visual suggestions stack up with such overbearing insistence that McQueen undermines his atmosphere of necrosis with "Get it, folks?" desperation. A street signal bent out of shape flashes "walk" as Brandon jogs in place, turning to the red hand as he resumes his run. After picking up the businesswoman his married boss pathetically hit on at a bar, the two screw against a concrete wall with "Fuck" scrawled above them. Motifs of Brandon's yuppie trappings fill the gaps, especially his laptop, which he seems to own solely to download porn and live chat with stripteasers. Having so quickly set up his protagonist, his style and his mood with the opening sequence, McQueen resorts to repeating himself ad nauseam, his exacting direction emphasizing only his own skill, never the inner complexity of a character. I've not seen the director's Hunger, but I can only pray it does not browbeat its audience into an admiration of its visual prowess as Shame does.

The emphatic visuals push the film's wafer thin thematic content with equal assertion. Brandon's sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), shows up (to Brandon's extreme discomfort), eliciting strong but cheap hints of incestuous attraction. The siblings have more than one confrontation where one is nude, and the two clearly struggle with conflicted feelings for each other. To get out his feelings, Brandon tries to clean up his act, even attempting a date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie), where the smooth bedder of women suddenly resembles an acne-scarred sophomore as he clumsily handles an actual date with conversation. And if you couldn't piece together that Brandon's sex addiction closes him off from real relationships, don't worry: you'll get plenty of subsequent scenes of punishing prostitute use to make sure we all haven't forgotten the effects of both normalcy and Sissy have on Brandon.

Nothing, though, can beat the arduous singing of "New York, New York," performed at a snail's crawl in full, clearly an attempt to pervert the musical advertisement of the city into something that reflects its seedy underbelly (certainly the line, "I wanna wake up in the city that doesn't sleep" has never been crooned with more irony). But this interminable scene merely sounds like someone messing with the turntable speed, and the embarrassing use of close-ups are as flat as the actual music. Self-indulgence is not a term I like to employ, given its overuse for practically any kind of artistic ambition, but rarely have I been so tempted to use it for this scene.

Throughout, Fassbender and Mulligan try their best to put some life into this drab series of surface textures. Mulligan plays Sissy with a bestial, unfocused longing that runs counter to her typical innocent waif image. Typically a great listener, Mulligan here portrays someone less capable of meaningful connection and engagement than even her solipsistic brother, for she lacks even the biological focus that diverts Brandon's hangups into an obsession. Sissy is a wretchedly underwritten character, but Mulligan makes up for this by making Sissy into a force of uninhibited, directionless dependence. So erratic and untamable is she that Fassbender's taut performance tears at the seams in dealing with her. As Brandon fights against his carnal desires and gets ever more entangled with Sissy and the vague but clearly unwelcome shared past she brings, Fassbender turns even more ghoulish. A scene late in the film of Brandon eerily, hungrily hitting on a taken woman casts him in sickly lighting that makes his erotic presence as repellent as it is magnetic. Fassbender plays the scene as if he has transcended any hint of pleasure in sex, a truly horrific snapshot of the addiction itself wearing Brandon as a skin.

Sadly, McQueen subsequently trades this genuine moment of horror for an extended series of climactic sorrows that neatly package shocks of various stripes drowned in Harry Escott's overwhelming score. So meaningless and emptily arty are these sequences that you could drop that black-and-white, slow-mo child death from the start of Antichrist in the middle of them and not raise a fuss. But for all the power of both Fassbender's and Mulligan's performances, McQueen's script has so routinely robbed them of any depth that his parade of woes never feels as harrowing as it thinks it is. And when the director concludes his film full-circle with a hint of ambiguity, he'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who, after all the talk of the nudity wears off, really cares what happens next.

Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011)

Cary Fukunaga displays such an immediate grasp of the Gothic tones of Charlotte Brontë's eerie, macabre romance that the speed with which he loses his grip upon them is all the more frustrating. Whenever his camera follows the protagonist outdoors, or into the dimmest, grimiest recesses of Rochester's home, Jane Eyre overflows with atmosphere. Its cold, flora-less English countrysides and purulent candlelit interiors capture the darker moods of Brontë's novel better than any of the few adaptations I've seen.

The romance is another story. Brontë's Jane Eyre puts forth a disturbingly insular love affair between two lonely pariahs. It's one of the most passionate books I've ever read, yet almost as off-putting in its unchecked desires as a Twilight novel. Jane and Rochester become obsessed with each other because they have no one else in the world, stewing in their lust and pain and terrifying joy in their private heaven and hell. Fukunaga's film communicates practically none of this dangerous level of attraction, omitting the novel's most perilous demonstrations of twisted, isolated love and softening what remains. Beginning with such perfect solemnity, Jane Eyre soon turns into a listless period drama not even livened by the raving embodiment of uninhibited female sexuality living in the attic.

But before the film even gets to Jane and Rochester's romance, it first does its damnedest to strip away dramatic tension with its errant timeline jumps, an error egregious for sapping the brilliant scenes of Jane's youth. These childhood scenes boil down the eeriness, terror, and crippling insurmountable oppression of Jane's abuse by relatives and schoolmasters to their despairing essence. Fukunaga makes even the doomed friendship between Jane and Helen more palpably devastating in this manner, reducing their screentime together to essentially meeting and Helen's last night alive. As they say, it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, and this Jane does not even get to enjoy a brief respite of companionship.

The childhood scenes also capture that peculiar blend of strength and frailty in the girl that Mia Wasikowska flawlessly portrays as the adult Jane. Thin and pale, Wasikowska looks as if she won't even make it past the opening, pre-flashback shots stumbling around the foggy, bleak countryside with only her ragged, panting breath for a soundtrack. But her slight frame also reveals so much bone structure that that which is visible on her is sharp, angular and hardened. Rochester finds himself attracted to Jane as much for her pointed directness as her kindness, and the actress exudes forthright immediacy in every gesture.

Wasikowska is the saving grace of the film, offering a masterclass in acting far beyond her years. She knows how to position herself in every shot for maximum effect, either to assert a strength that never ceases to surprise or a vulnerability that cannot shatter her adamantine will but can bring her to the verge of collapse. It's a performance so minutely controlled that you can turn the sound off and not miss anything Jane communicates throughout the film. And Wasikowska does this within the stiff-upper-lip confines of period-style acting, her gestures never huge but unfurling huge swaths of pain, desire, and sorrow.

If only she clicked with Rochester. Michael Fassbender has quickly and justifiably emerged as one of the finest actors of his generation, but his Rochester is curiously inert. Though vague tendrils of lust wrap around his eyes when he first converses/engages in a verbal sparring match with Jane, Fassbender never properly communicates the crippling desire Rochester feels for Jane. Part of this isn't his fault—Fukunaga and screenwriter Moira Buffini strip away his most desperate actions, especially the darkly hysterical setpiece of him dressing up as a gypsy fortuneteller to drive away his ostensible fiancée and test Jane—giving him almost nothing to do past the 45-minute mark. Fassbender beautifully renders Rochester's boorishness, but that side of Rochester fades quickly to be replaced, in theory, by the lovesick man incapable of taming himself. In practice, however, Fassbender soon has little to do save brood, reducing Rochester's terrifying intemperance to the Edward Cullen-esque passionate dispassion that (very) indirectly grew out of Rochester in the first place.


For a fleeting moment I thought Jane Eyre would be one of the finest literary adaptations in recent memory, Fukunaga's gifted direction generating gulfs of mood out of his wordless opening shots and Wasikowska's pitch-perfect performance nailing Jane even when the script fails to understand the character. Sadly, its temporal bouncing and too-stripped narrative lose focus and attention before the film moves past its first act. Neither a great film nor even a particularly good one, Jane Eyre nevertheless flirts so boldly with greatness that its failure to live up to its own ambition merely disappoints. And I'd gladly watch it again to see Wasikowska blow away a decade's worth of corseted Keira Knightley gigs in one shot.

Capsule Reviews: Red-Headed Woman, Waterloo Bridge, Fish Tank

Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932)

"So blondes have all the fun, huh?" asks the platinum blonde goddess Jean Harlow, here sporting a wig so fiery you can practically see the ginger blaze in black and white. The question is less an interrogative than the slap of a gauntlet across the face of those who would deny this redhead her fun. Like Stanwyck in Baby Face, Harlow uses sex to climb to the top. Also like Stanwyck, she's such a sexual force that she barely puts any effort at all into her eyelash-fluttering wilting flower bit, her crocodile tears a half-step above saying "Boo-hoo" in perfect monotone. But when the men fold like deck chairs, why waste time honing the craft? Harlow was never more seductive or unrepentant; her conniving grin presages Jack Nicholson at his most manic, and her asymptotic eyebrows divebomb toward her eyeballs, only to catch a glimpse of the steel and fire in them and make a last-second attempt to break out of their gravitational pull. It gives her a perpetually furious look, and at times you wonder if Cagney put on drag to play this part.

It's amazing to think Conway actually cut this film for Hays Office approval, as its almost combative sexuality and defiance is precisely the reason that office was created in the first place. But no one can resist the sultry charm of the redhead, and the social outrage that greeted the film only drove up its profits further. If you look hard enough at the end, you can almost see Harlow laughing her way to the bank. Grade: B

Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931)

Waterloo Bridge is one of the more disturbing Pre-Code films out there, less for its forthright treatment of social malaise, sexuality and crime than its contextualizing of same around not the sinful speakeasies but war-torn London gripped in panic and confusion. Mae Clarke extrapolates the pain and bewilderment she brought to The Public Enemy to fit the protagonist Myra, an impoverished, American chorus girl stranded in London during WWI, too penniless to return home from the storm. To get by, she turns to prostitution, a plan that jades her but does not wholly rob her innocence, an innocence that comes to the fore when a sweet Canadian soldier (Douglass Montgomery) comes into her life and she can't bear to hurt him. A mournful quality hangs over this film that stresses the weariness of world-weariness. Clarke's hardened exterior soon cracks, and the waves of revulsion and sadness that wash over her face (a face that registers pure helplessness over her situation) are heartbreaking. So troubling are the implications of its view of how poverty and war has the grimmest of consequences, it's no wonder the film met with huge controversy despite clearly portraying prostitution as a bad thing where so many Pre-Codes viewed it as a mere way of life. A sense of pointlessness hangs over this film, and as a depiction of the waste and senselessness of war, it makes the home front as savage and horrific as the trenches of All Quiet on the Western Front. Grade: A

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Arnold's tight 4:3 framing drops a Mentos in a Diet Coke and shakes up the bottle. Her view of a council estate is initially chaotic, wrapped up in aggressive editing, hand-held shots, violence among teens and language so coarse it takes on a physicality of its own; it's a wonder the film doesn't catch fire in the gate. Things smooth into a more coherent portrait of directionless youth with a terrific, anguished performance from discovery Katie Jarvis and a shifting portrayal of emotional stability and warmth in Michael Fassbender's kind but vaguely off-putting Connor. Arnold's crisp imagery is breathtaking, and she never uses it ironically, even when capturing the glint of sunlight through a cheap plastic bottle. It makes everything so much more tragic, the characters unable to see the gorgeous beauty around them for their troubles. A credibility-stretching but harrowing climax drives Mia to the brink, and it's a miracle Arnold wrings some kind of vague, cautious hope out of the end, more so that she does so to the strains of Nas' "Life's a Bitch." Grade: B+

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn, 2011)

Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class shows his continual fragmentation as a filmmaker, seemingly incapable of sticking to any one idea and the continual downward spiral of his satiric abilities, although the fact that the film feels at all tongue-in-cheek suggests a muted cleverness at work that never quite shows through the convoluted wash of genres tossed at the screen. Maybe the filmmakers wanted to break up the rote feel of a prequel, an admirable decision given the execrable Wolverine, but the film can't help but grind to a halt when it attempts to incorporate '60s era Bond, Dr. Strangelove, The Breakfast Club and on-the-nose subtext of closeted homosexuality into the already bombastic superhero genre.

At least the leads are great. Michael Fassbender plays Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr as a sleek but imploding killer seeking revenge for the horrors he experienced as a test subject of experimental doctors in the Holocaust, not yet hardened into Ian McKellen's cool shell. He's the first person to look sinister in a turtleneck in decades. James McAvoy, making the best of a wildly inconsistent character, plays Charles as wide-eyed and with a joy of knowledge that occasionally dips into good-natured arrogance and one too many uses of the word "groovy." He has all of Professor X's optimism with unchecked naïveté: he hasn't yet had to test and earn that fundamental belief in the goodness of mankind.

The first half-hour of the film (its best) separates the two as they grow into themselves, Erik in a Nazi camp, Xavier in the lap of luxury, and the marked contrast in their experiences delineates their personalities. Erik spends his first adult scenes as a loner tracking down Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), the man who brutally brought out Erik's metal-manipulating abilities in the camps. Charles, with his long-time friend Raven, a.k.a. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), finds himself working for the C.I.A. when an operative (Rose Byrne) uncovers a nuclear war plot by Shaw. For Charles, getting to work with the government, regardless of the agreement's fragility an frigidity, is a wonderful opportunity to prove the mutant place in society; Erik is already comfortable outside it.

The opening segments play up those Bond elements, featuring the intrigue of Erik's tear through hiding Nazis and the tour of the lingerie-and-world-secret-filled social labyrinth of the Hellfire Club run by Shaw. When Charles and Erik meet and join forces, they do so against the looming Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to shots of the War Room that feel incomplete without a flailing George C. Scott.

This compounds the perfunctory feel of the film, mixing the foregone conclusion of history with the foregone conclusion of an origin story. One spends the whole film waiting not only for Charles and Erik to become the characters we know them as in their older years but to see the Cuban Missile Crisis averted. It highlights and underlines the inevitable outcome inherent to the prequel form.

Unfortunately, once the film begins adding characters, it only slips further into predictability. The young cast of mutants assembled to take down Shaw exist at the whim of plot, initially incapable of controlling their powers and having on-the-nose discussions—Mystique and Beast's (Nicholas Hoult) romance should have Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" playing under it at all times—yet somehow getting a handle on their abilities and maturing to the point of facing death within a week's time. The only consistent character in this film January Jones' Emma Frost, if only because Jones looks indifferent in every shot; her ability to turn into a shiny but dull, inexpressive hunk of diamond suggests her superpower is manifesting her personality.

Shifting from high-budget Glee episode to mythology-establishing epic erodes what little tension Vaughn had amassed in his earlier segments by dropping all pretext at camp and belatedly going for broke. The climax feels so deflated that I wondered if the hissing in my theater wasn't the sound of the air conditioner but of the film itself leaking. Charles and Erik devolve into manifesto-spewing mouthpieces, their speeches so grandiose even the action takes a backseat. For a film with so many shots of gobsmacked humans staring at unbelievable sights, X-Men: First Class ultimately feels strangely pedestrian despite its ambitions.

Much of the blame falls at Vaughn's feet: he uses lazy camerawork to overemphasize themes (every thematic speech gets its own close-up, and the zoom lens also gets a workout) and his treatment of the inherent cheese of the comic book form is too inconsistent to be particularly clever. He does have some nice touches, however: an early 90-degree jump from Shaw's Nazi office to reveal a medical lab with saws and knives off to the side is a brilliant shot that the director never equals. Also making the scene is the unique opportunity to hear one of those ridiculous "NOOOOOOO" screams in another language.

As blatant as the themes of acceptance and identity are, X-Men: First Class works best when it hones in on the unsure emotions of physically maturing people coming to terms with themselves. "I thought I was the only one," several say with a breathlessness suggesting their happiness has constricted every muscle, including the vocal cords. Those flecks of joyous, comforting self-recognition in others are the backbone of the X-Men franchise, and it's a shame Vaughn couldn't spend more time drawing out those feelings instead of cramming a whole trilogy worth of plots into one film.