A Dangerous Method (4/5 Stars)

I wonder how Carl Jung would react to this movie if he were still around to see it. There are some very private moments portrayed here. At one point the movie goes so far as to follow Jung and one of his patients into the bedroom for that most basic ritual of sadomasochistic sexual behavior. Part of me would think that Jung would be mortified that this would be up on a huge screen for everybody to see. But then another part of me reminds the other part of what exactly Jung was involved in. There is a fine comic moment in the film when Professor Sigmund Freud has Carl Jung over for dinner and politely explains to him that he should feel absolutely free to discuss anything and everything at the table. And there sitting at the table are all of Freud’s children, the majority of which are at or near very impressionable ages. This is based on a true anecdote. Freud’s children did indeed sit through many a dinner conversation that focused explicitly on sex, psychotic compulsions, and all sorts of other taboo conversational topics. So that part of me would not be surprised if Carl Jung would, instead of being totally embarrassed, actually take the stage at the end of the movie and ask the audience point blank what exactly they thought about it and please feel free to focus in on the kinky stuff.

The “dangerous” method refers to such behavior. Instead of repressing thoughts and conversation about sex, taboo, psychotic compulsions and the like, go ahead and talk about it and try to be as specific as possible as to why you feel and think the way you do. Such a therapeutic method was first suggested by Freud, but according to the movie was never experimented by him. Carl Jung apparently was the first and the patient he first tried it on was a young Russian woman named Sabina who came to his hospital in fits of hysteria. Jung puts her in a chair, sits behind her (presumably so she can’t see his reactions to her craziness and feel to shamed to speak more of it), and quietly asks her questions that would be very impolite in any regular conversation. Does it work? Yes, it seems to, at least in the sense that it grants the sort of relief one may feel after solving a complex riddle. The problem is still there, but at least now we know what it is. This movie work on the audience in the same way. We are presented with a person that is crazy. The seemingly random shrieks and fits are confusing and frightening. But we observe and listen and slowly achieve an understanding. Suddenly the person makes sense, her actions become predictable, and the fear and uneasiness that accompanied us dissipates. We feel relief.  The best of movies like psychoanalysis strive for that ecstatic “Aha!” moment. There is one such moment in this movie and if Keira Knightley gets a nomination for her performance (which is not unlikely), it will probably be that moment people are recognizing her for. (It should be said that bad movies work in the exact opposite way. Think of movies where the basic laws of physics are ignored, the characters act like aliens, or the repetitive use of cliché is foisted upon the audience. A sense of unease fills the viewer. I sometimes find myself getting mad.) 

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud are played by Michael Fassbinder and Viggo Mortenson respectively. Now here are two actors with Presence. They are perfect choices for playing intellectual heavyweights. I’ve praised Mortenson before (see review of “Eastern Promises”) but I have yet had the chance of writing about Fassbinder as he has only this year started to take on starring roles. Most people probably know him as Magneto in this summer’s “X-Men: First Class.” I remember him being very striking in that as well. There is something very solid about his face/person/body. I think he would make a perfect Roman Emperor or at least a marble statue of one. The scenes with Freud and Jung talking, whether in agreement or in disagreement, are always stimulating and make the movies best scenes. In fact, some of the best lines are supposedly taken directly from the letters they wrote each other. Those two could really turn a phrase and when they meant the words to hurt, the phrases could be especially piercing. It is a disappointment then that this movie treats Freud as a truly supporting character. The main storyline is the affair between the married Jung and his patient Sabina. When Freud enters the picture, he serves that storyline. His character lacks his own conflict or overarching ambition. It is spoken by Freud that he has many enemies to himself, his profession, and psychology in general, but these enemies are not shown or battled with. Freud is seen either through Jung’s or Sabina’s experience or not at all.

There is plenty of psychological talk about egos and sex instincts and the death instincts and the like. Some of it you may find familiar. Other topics not so much. The movie does a commendable job of not holding discussions back to a standard level of education. This may make some of the conversations inaccessible to understanding but not unentertaining. All the characters are especially intelligent and the screenplay puts up no obstacles to them expressing themselves at the peak of their intelligence. If you are a huge psychology buff, this movie will not disappoint. If like me, you know some things and not others, and are not entirely sure of the accuracy or usefulness of the whole thing, it is at least never annoying. In some ways it is rather comic. Psychology then (and now) is very new. Freud admits as much and goes on to say that he is probably wrong about everything being about sex and surely theories will be revised when more research is done. In the meantime he is just describing his scientific experiences as he observes them. I especially liked a conversation in which Jung describes one of Sabina’s childhood recollections about a preferable way to defecate. Freud nods his head and diagnoses her as anal-retentive and predicts that she is probably also especially fastidious, clean, organized, and the like. No, says Jung, actually she is quite the opposite. Hmm, says Freud, oh well maybe it’s a Russian thing. (Freud is very subtly funny in this movie. In real life he apparently was subtly funny as well. I am a huge fan of his book on jokes. When I write of comedy on this blog, it is mainly his ideas that I am espousing.)

Of course the basic problem with psychology is not that it is incorrect but that it has a tendency to be too vague and broad to be incorrect. It is not hard to find sexual motives or childhood neuroses as a part of any action we take. They are there. But that doesn't mean that it is the only reason why people do things. Really there are probably a thousand reasons why people do things and those only include the reasons we can think of. And that still ignores the possibility that people may indeed not have a reason for doing things. I am reminded of an anecdote from the comedian Louis C.K. about how he loaded the dishwasher one night and then didn’t turn on the wash. His wife scolded him and asked, “Why did you do that?” Louis relates to the audience, “Why did I do that? Do you understand what that question assumes? That I had a reason for not putting on the wash, like I had a thought process about it. Like I didn’t because I wanted to be a total dick and piss her off, which would really be the only reason not to run the dishwasher. Why can’t I just be stupid? Why didn’t I put the wash on? Because I am a total dumbass, that’s why.” I think this possibility is something rather thoughtful people like Jung, Freud, or Sabina tend to not think about, and I think it is because they spend so much time thinking about why people do things that they forget that most people do not think as much as they do about why they do things. They probably don't get laid enough either. 

Black Swan (5/5 Stars)

Excuse me while I catch my breath.

Suppose that you wanted to be perfect. What would it take? Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a NYC Lincoln Center’s production of Swan Lake. It’s an incredibly difficult role, one of the most challenging in ballet. The Swan Queen is simultaneously two characters at once, the innocent and pure White Swan and her evil twin the sensuous and seductive Black Swan. The story of Swan Lake is simple. An evil beast casts a spell on a woman that transforms her into a swan during the day. The spell can only be broken by true love. Her prince see her at night, learns her secret, falls in love, and promises to use his true love to break the spell. But before they elope, the evil beast presents the evil twin of the woman to the prince. The evil twin tricks the prince who pledges his love to her instead. Bereft of true love and left with no hope that the spell will ever be broken, the woman kills herself.

The only way I think to understand the horrific things that happen to Nina Sayers in this movie is through the prism of a performing technique called Method Acting. Method Acting is employed when an actor seeks a great performance by not acting at all. Instead of pretending to be character, they attempt to become that character. For example if an actor were to play a taxi driver, a method actor may actually get a license and drive a taxi for several months before the shoot (which is exactly what Robert De Niro did to prepare for his role “Taxi Driver.”) The most ridiculous preparer of all is perhaps Christian Bale, who was to play a thin person in “The Machinist,” and of his own initiative dropped his weight to an awfully unhealthy 110 pounds for the role. But lets say that you wanted to try Method Acting out for the role of the Swan Queen. Well, you would need two things. 1) You would need to be a Swan, and 2) You would need to be Split Personality Schizophrenic. How else are you going to be two people at once? And this is basically what happens to Nina Sayers. She goes insane. Nobody catches it in time because the deeper she descends into madness, the better a performer she becomes.

Helping her through the downward spiral of perfection are several other people. The first is Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey. She gave up her own ballerina career to have Nina and now lives vicariously through her daughter. She makes sure Nina’s life is ballet and only ballet. Nina eats grapefruits, takes the subway to Lincoln Center, practices all day, goes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep. It is a workaholic life bereft of all pleasure. Then there is her tough instructor played by Vincent Cassell. He mercilessly informs Nina that her dispassionate perfectionism is perfect for the White Swan but terrible for the Black Swan. She needs to let go and feel the music. His idea of the best way to help her achieve this is through sexual harassment, both psychological and physical. The harassment doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the fact that her instructor doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself while doing it. All she wants is to be perfect. A fellow ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, has a much more common sense way of going about it. She invites her to dinner, gets her drunk, gives her a rufi (which Nina sees being put into her drink), and takes her to one of those clubs where you can’t see or hear anything but strobe lights and a rhythmic pulse. This works. The result is well, ahem, the result is a sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. There is heavy breathing...among other things. Meanwhile Nina keeps seeing a doppelganger of herself dressed entirely in black pop up in the most inconvenient places. First on the subway, then on a city street, and then in the mirrors of her dance studio. Seriously scary shit. 

The Director of this picture is Darren Aronofsky. If you’ve seen any of his other movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “The Wrestler,” you will notice that no other director is so artfully mean to his characters. The same is true of “Black Swan.” There are plenty of similar techniques from both of those previous movies. Like “The Wrestler,” this movie shows the real physical costs of a performance. Nina breaks a toenail in one scene. In another she has to pry her toes apart. Weird scars start forming on her shoulder blades. And like the drugs in “Requiem for a Dream,” the scenes of ballet are shown in spectacular fashion, hallucinations included. The score was done by Clint Mansell, the same person who composed the Requiem, and like “Requiem for a Dream,” the climax of this story (the performance of Swan Lake on opening night) matches incredible visuals and super-emotional acting with a very powerful piece of music (Tchiakovsky played very loudly) that goes on for about fifteen minutes and left me emotionally exhausted. Truth be told, my heart rate and breathing had actually accelerated so much that I had to wait through half the credits in order to calm myself down. If the Great Intellectual Experience of the year was “Inception,” than the Great Emotional Experience of the year is “Black Swan.” It should easily receive nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Makeup, Costumes, Score, among other things. Natalie Portman, who trained for an entire year and did most of her own ballet, has pulled off the performance of a lifetime. She would be a lock for the Oscar in almost any other year that didn’t also have Lisbeth Salandar lurking around in the background.

One thing people repeatedly tell me when I recommend movies such as “Black Swan,” is that they aren’t in the mood for a “good movie.” They would much rather just unwind on the couch and watch junk. In the past the best I could do was simply persuade people to not watch anything at all. For instance, I would argue that if you don’t want to hear a good story or be affected in any way, why don’t you just stare at a blank wall or meditate. Better yet, if you’re too tired to watch a good movie, take a nap. But that line of reasoning only stops people from watching junk. So let me rephrase the argument in this way. Lets say you are at an amusement park. Junk TV is like the merry-go-round, the Tea Cups, the bumper cars, etc. “Black Swan,” is the highest roller coaster in the park. Now you have a choice: You can take your good money and precious time and spend it all day on the merry-go-round doing something you’ve done a thousand times before or you can stop being a wimp and go see the ballerina movie. True the height of the drops should make any reasonable person apprehensive and true it may be “hard to watch” as you are racing toward the bottom at very high speeds but, come on, everyone said it was fun (Black Swan has a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and inside you know its just a movie. You will be exiting the ride alive and intact with but a sense of giddiness and awesome that is perfectly normal given the adrenaline rush. You may even want to experience something quite like that again. Perhaps skydiving next time. (Have you seen “Requiem for a Dream”?) If you’re embarrassed to be affected by something so deeply with other people around, I suggest you go and see the movie alone. And if it takes you awhile after the movie to compose yourself before exiting the theater, that’s fine too. That’s what the end credits of good movies are for.

Eastern Promises 09/23/07

I came into this movie with a bias against David Cronenberg the director. Almost an ultimatum. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, well screw you I won't see any more of you're movies. He is, without saying, not one of my favorite directors. In fact I've seen a couple of movies (Naked Lunch, and Madame Butterfly) that sucked more than sucked and one movie (A History of Violence) that left me scarred by the grotesque violence and befuddled by a strange ending. If this one wasn't great like they all said, then I would stick with my instincts and never see another of his movies again.
As it turns out I've added a corollary to my anti-Cronenberg sentiment. Don't see anyone of his movies except the ones with Viggo Mortensen in it. These two were made for each other and together they are turning in the best work either of them have ever done. This movie is a magnum opus of Mortensen. It's his classic. Most people will probably know him from Lord of the Rings, but this was the role he was born for and probably will be remembered for. There's screen presence and then there's Screen Presence and Viggo's gangster has the capitalized version. He's scary like no other. His demeanor is so controlled and intense. His posture is so straight. His hair is slick and he's covered in tattoos. When he's naked he's still not naked. He's got armor. This guy doesn't play a tough macho guy, he is a tough guy. And its not in you're face, it's outward and inward and all the way through played subtly in an over top way. Viggo would look from left to right and I would be like "whoa, he just looked that way. That was so awesome." That's Screen Presence. The guy is hypnotic.
Unfortunately Cronenberg plays the story safe near the end when he should be exploding it. It isn't a great story but its got a great charachter and just for Mortensen I would recommend it. Keep in mind that this is Cronenberg of course, so when someone gets stabbed or has their throat slit or is attacked in a steam room they really do get stabbed, have their throat slit, and fight for their lives in a steam room. It's cringe inducing violence, but hey, that's Cronenberg. You've been duly warned.