At first annoying, then interesting, until ultimately amusing, Director David Cronenberg tackles the challenge of a young Jewish, Russian patient/student, Sabina (Kiera Knightley) as the dividing issues between Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen.) Sabina is to sit one to two hours every day with Jung to see if he can figure out why she’s basically “freaking out” when the story open in Zurich 1904. This is where the film is “annoying” since Knightley can’t act and would have been better cast as Kate Winslet. (The only upside is the filmmakers avoid Sabina’s real life compulsion with masturbation and defecation.)
No sooner we come to think of Sabina as crazy, we’re expected to believe that Jung would utilize her as a student and respected colleague when he could barely contain her ten minutes earlier. I felt like screaming ‘somebody should get this shrink a shrink!”
Two years later they travel to Vienna where he meets with Freud and a very ‘talky’ bond ensues. Freud asks Jung to treat one of his fellow psychiatrists (Vincent Cassel.) Cassel is a refreshing presence on screen, the same wicked albeit toned down version of his performance in last year’s Black Swan, especially when he convinces Jung to cross the line from student to lover (much as he did in Swan.)
The affair begins, with the proper discretions of its time in history yet its odd (and amusing) when they have lovers’ spats and this same woman who flipped out in the films earlier sequences is now as calm as Lady Olenska in Age of Innocence. There is loving and spankings and lust and insanity, but the movie is best when the tennis match conversations between Freud and Jung occurs – their different way of thinking, their precise and clear methods, their wit, and finally their egos. It’s Knightley that’s the problem both in the storyline and in the acting. Fortunately the Screenplay is brilliant.
There is a series of dialog in the film that proves the fact that in life we are either “Spillers” or “restrainers.” Freud says “Tell me your dream” and Jung goes into great detail. Then Jung says “Tell me YOUR dream” and Freud says “I had one, too.” And Jung says “Tell me” and Freud said “I wouldn’t want to risk my authority.”
Throughout the film Freud sits at the head of the throne and will analysis and analogies that are of course, nothing short of brilliant. But it’s Jung who is a tortured lover, a complacent coward and says to his Sabina “My love for you is the greatest thing in my life. It made me understand who I am. Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to go out living.”
The movie is very pin-on precise with whatever the message it’s trying to deliver. In this case social structure, discretion, subtlety yet with an overview of how everything in life can be examined in sexual terms. Two tiaras