A Dangerous Method (2011)

A DANGEROUS METHOD  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: David Cronenberg
    Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen,
    Vincent Cassel, Sarah Gadon
Michael Fassbender as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud duke it out on the intellectual battlefield of early 20th-century psychoanalysis. So Freud pontificates and smokes a lot of cigars (because sometimes a cigar is just, well, you know . . .), and Jung hooks up with a patient named Sabina Spielrein (the human skeleton known as Keira Knightley), who becomes a psychoanalyst herself. (She also likes to be spanked.) It's a movie of ideas, a lot of it just people talking, or exchanging letters, and it holds your interest, even if, like some of us, you've somehow made it through school and life without ever cracking a psych book. Fassbender and Mortensen are the essence of restraint, while Knightley plays Spielrein with intense physicality, twisting her limbs into knots and sticking her chin out so far, you wonder how she managed not to dislocate her jaw. The spanking scenes are notably discreet.