Nancy's Reads & Reels: 'A Dangerous Method' and 'Mildred Pierce'

A Dangerous Method is a movie about the feud between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). I know what you’re thinking— talky and BORING. Yes it was talky, but no it was not boring.

The movie opens with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) being carried into an asylum in Switzerland where Carl Jung proceeds to cure her of her screaming, playing in food and paddling around in mud. Eventually, though, she becomes his mistress — who knew? 

Knightley screams, thrusts out her chin and makes her eyes bulge. I remember Olivia de Haveland in The Snakepit and I don’t recall such histrionics. I think it was more the other inhabitants of the asylum. That was only the first of many movies about women and madness. Only last year it was Black Swan.

In A Dangerous Method Freud is never far away from a drink or a cigar and is adamant about the correctness of his sexual theory. In contrast, Jung seems the more compassionate and willing to entertain other theories.

Jung seems a happily married man and yet he enters into a torrid affair with his patient. His wife, Emma Jung (Sarah Gadon), gives birth to his children and has the money to support their luxurious lifestyle, whereas Freud seems quite the opposite. The movie doesn’t delve into Freud’s home life.

David Cronenberg directs so right away you know you’re in for something unsettling — remember Crash or The Fly, among others.

I’ve seen the original Mildred Pierce (1945) a number of times and thought Joan Crawford as Mildred (who received an Academy Award) and Anne Blyth, as her daughter, Vida, were great as were Jack Carson, Zachary Scott and Eve Arden. (William Faulkner worked on the screenplay with others).

Watching the HBO mini-series with Kate Winslet, Guy Pierce, Evan Rachel Wood, and Melissa Leo, I wondered how they could stretch out a 90-minute movie for five hours. Both are based on the 1941 novel by James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity) and the HBO adaptation tries to follow the book in every way possible.

Contrasting the movie Mildred Pierce to the HBO mini-series makes me prefer the movie and yet they are so different you almost can’t compare them. The movie was a film noir popular at the time while the HBO production is more about the curse of a dream coming true and the times the characters lived in — the depression.

A Dangerous Method and Mildred Pierce are historical dramas set in far different times. Costumes and sets are done to perfection in both.