A Dangerous Method

It cannot all be about sex, can it? One hopes there is some room for violence. A Dangerous Method is a dramatization of the subtleties of an century-old intellectual disagreement between two bearded academics, so alas, no one's head is going to spontaneously combust. On one side is Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), father of the talking cure, now known as psychoanalysis, who insists all base urges are ultimately sexual. On the other side is his dashing younger colleague Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), whose fascination with mysticism and higher planes of the human spirit threatens to undermine the movement Freud wishes to spark. When a troubled yet nubile patient, Sabina Spierlein (Keira Knightley) enters Jung's clinics, she upends his carefully held notions and eventually drives a chasm between two schools of thought.

The first problem with A Dangerous Method is that is presupposes in its audience some understanding of the Freud. From the outset this suggests if not the correctness, than at least the importance of the Viennese psychoanalyst's work in comparison to his rival's. That David Cronenberg casts Viggo Mortensen, the star pupil of his filmic  universe in recent years, as the droll, bemused Freud further belies the director's sympathies. In a crucial scene, he refuses to impart his dreams to Jung for fear he will "surrender his authority"; Cronenberg seems to desire this surrender even less than the man himself.

All of this is to say the deck, cards of which include basic human needs and evolutionary conditioning, is stacked against Jung. We watch him wriggle uncomfortably as he tries to repress his desires for Sabina, only to end up giving her a vigorous spanking. This in turn fulfills her darkest wishes, namely sexual release through humiliation. Again, though this film is about a debate, it seems decided from the first moment Jung lays eyes on the comely Spierlein. His wife, in reality a brilliant mind in her own right, is portrayed as a depressive housewife; Jung is literally encouraged by another psychoanalyst (the lewd drug addict Otto Gross, played malevolently and to type by Vincent Cassel) towards adultery.

The disappointing aspect of The Dangerous Method is that while it favors eruption over repression, the eruption is very little. Cronenberg's earlier work has been jam-packed with Freudian images, dreams and otherwise; yet the three-chambered uteruses and phallic typewriters are nowhere to be found. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from play "The Talking Cure", sometimes word-for-word, there is rarely any room beyond the dialogue for our thoughts to wander. In this way it feels much more like a daring thesis than a fully realized film. It takes almost the entire length of the film before we realize Spierlein's maturation from mental patient to psychologist is the defining arc of the narrative.

Ironically, Knightley's transformation is so shocking she will probably be criticized for overacting in the earlier scenes, where her movements are all crossed limbs and jutting jaw. In a movie that covers a decade of history, Fassbender's gaze becomes just a shade colder and more disillusioned, while Sabina is seen reborn. That much of this is happens offscreen while Freud and Jung bicker about dreams and "the movement" can be seen as ingeniously understated or missing the point entirely. Her own theories and papers, which suggest a destruction of the self in every sexual act, are more interesting than how much Jung hates his child-bearing wife. It probably hurts her screen time that she is the least famous of the main characters.

Yet the Jung and Freud who so dominate A Dangerous Method seem more like avatars of specific theories than historically grounded representations. Freud makes mention of his and Spierlein's status as Jews - yet there is little discrimination within the safety of one's drawing room or padded cell. It is Jung who dreams of "the blood of Europe" - the Prostestant, always overreaching in Freud's opinion, always trying to fix the unsolvable problem. Though Cronenberg pays lip service to the politics of the times, he clearly views them as thematically irrelevant, an aside from the history rather than the body text itself. A Dangerous Method is not really a study of the times that birthed our most enduring understanding of the human psyche - it is a more general treatise on that psyche itself, in light of those ideas. It does not wish to leave the seclusion of the hearth any more than Freud, and go wandering in the streets of a specific time and place. However, in doing this the film divorces its subject from its setting - a tactic that might go over better if the characters did not bear such recognizable names.

Hugo

"Time hasn't been very kind to old movies," a film professor mournfully remarks, not in a PBS documentary, but in Martin Scorsese's new family film Hugo. The serious fellow, played by a bearded Michael Stuhlbarg, may seem out of place for those expecting Home Alone 4: Paris Train Station, given Hugo's PG rating and whimsical palette. I cannot have been the only one concerned by the announcement, two years ago, that Mr. Scorsese would be spending the foreseeable future working on a film that prominently features a small child being chased by a cruel station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his faithful Doberman. And given that it would be shot in 3-D and involve the owner of a toy store, the probability that Marty had another Taxi Driver in store for us was slim.

Guns are never drawn nor heads subjected to the vise in Hugo - that would be the work of the younger Scorsese, who in recent years has transformed into the referential grand master of The Aviator and Shutter Island, his work focusing as much on preservation as it does on narrative. I had not read the Caldecott award-winning book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, so the actual subject matter took me by some surprise. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living within the walls and clocks of the Montparnasse train station in the 1930s. His father (Jude Law), a clockmaker, having died in an accident, Hugo spends his days stealing parts to repair an automaton, a sort of robot used by magicians in "yore".

When it turns out that one of the shopkeepers he has been stealing from is filmmakers Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), Hugo deftly switches from kiddie adventure to a personal plea from Scorsese himself. The asthmatic child turned national treasure has caught us, quite cleverly, in a campaign to save the cinema. Amidst his 3-D objects flying directly at the screen (none more frightening that the proboscises of Cohen and Kingsley), Scorsese is preaching a deafening gospel about the danger of forgetting the old spectacle when presented with the new one.

That is what makes Selznick's novel so fitting for this stage of both Scorsese's career and film history - studios are rushing into the eras of digital and 3D full steam ahead. Melies himself was the original special effects artist - his background as a magician served him well in this respect. Melies pioneered colorization and stop motion animation, essential building blocks for every CGI shot we see in movies today; today he is largely forgotten, his tricks taken for granted. When Shutter Island landed a release date in the February graveyard, did Scorsese feel that same obsolescence? Hugo has landed him in the busiest moviegoing weekend of the year, with a rating and a target audience that will reach the Harry Potter crowd loud and clear. Here is another orphan hanging out in an enchanted train station, with a regiment of revered British character actors waiting in the wings; yet Hugo also has a point, not just about the world we live in, but the theater where we've come to escape.

This is not to say Scorsese is against 3D - his quotes upon Hugo's release suggest he finds the medium an exciting evolution of the cinema. Yet, like sound and color before it, we cannot think it replaces everything that came before. When you go to see Hugo, two trailers appear before hand: a 3D rendering of Disney's Beauty and the Beast, and a 3D rendering of James Cameron's Titanic. Whatever you may think of those films, technological manglings of their original craftsmanship cannot be the best use of Hollywood's time.  In recent years, theaters have been pushing us towards the new gimmick, and forcing us to choose; Hugo reminds us such a decision need not be final. The past and the present must be allowed to exist separately and peacefully, one informing the other while never overshadowing it. It is no coincidence Hugo spends his days behind the faces of enormous clocks, dutifully keeping them on time.

Scorsese keeps true to his recent form by conducting a pageant of references throughout Hugo. A wonderful sequence takes us through Melies' early career in the fashion of a pop-up book, getting the most out of his 3D apparatus and the vampish theatricality of early silent films. Hugo sneaks into a showing of Harold Lloyds' Safety Last! and winds up in a similar predicament hanging off the edge of a building. Trains perpetually rush directly at us out of the screen. Of course there are the smaller moments Scorsese can never resist at this point, homages to Hitchcock, Bergman, Truffaut and countless others. Hugo is the perfect work for Scorsese to undertake at this point in his career, and 3D the perfect medium - he shows us the old and the new on the same screen, not segregated between digital and 35mm. We see the whimsy of the old; the possibilities of the new. The wonders of the past are not dead; they aren't even past.

The Descendants

To qualify everything that is to follow, let me say that I have only seen the George Clooney vehicle The Descendants once. This is usually the case for any movie I review on this site, especially a new release. However with the work of Alexander Payne it bears special note. His films, which tend to travel along solemn narrative byways while only occasionally stop for a quick chuckely, tend to reveal much more when one can drop the pretense of drama altogether and simply focus on the absurd elements. Seeing it as I did in a packed house screening with Payne and the cast waiting in the wings, the crowd was certainly pleased, or at least had some immediate incentive to act that way. As was the case with his last two films, Sideways and About Schmidt, I am sure laughter covered up some of the films most wonderful one-offs and double takes.

Clooney plays Matt King, a modest real-estate lawyer by trade, a woefully out-of-his-depth dad and grieving husband for the purposes of the story, whose wife lies in a terminal coma after a boating accident. Forced to pull on the plug on her as per instructions in her will, He and his daughters Scottie and Alexandera (Amara Miller and Shailene Woodley) must travel to the various islands of Hawaii to inform friends and relatives its time to say goodbye. While this might sound formulaic, at least we have a road movie about a man getting in touch with children he never had time for, et cetera. Where The Descendants gets itself in trouble is the arch-plot: King is also the trustee of a 25,000 acre plot breathtaking wilderness that was first purchased in the 1860s by his ancestors, which is to be sold in a few weeks, the profits divided among all the far flung cousins. An early scene shows various models of hotels and golf courses; this from a director who has previously brought us wine-snobs and student government elections. Glossing over the emotional power of euthanasia and skipping straight to the righteous anger of environmental protection hardly feels like his milieu.

Yet even the signature Alexander Payne touches in The Descendants feel well worn. Alexandra's revelation that King was being cuckolded is all too close to the exact same plot point in About Schmidt, where a widower is confronted with a disturbing yet liberating truth about his dearly departed. Another Payne trademark, the ironic voiceover, here has lost all its edge. Statements like "a family is like an archipelago" seem more like laziness on the part of the writers than the character. Even more damning is the fact that this voiceover all but vanishes early in the second act. Shoddy justification of the setting complete through some black and white photographs (more than a few late-period Wes Anderson flourishes to be found here), Payne and Clooney return to their comfort zones.

Matt Harris noted on Grantland.com last week that: 

"the difference between The Descendants with Clooney and The Descendants with someone else is the difference between a movie you get to see and a movie you don’t." 

It is ironic that the international icon is the film's chief failing. While Clooney is not miscast, certainly does nothing to justify his participation. This is the flip, suave Clooney we have come to expect, stylized by Soderbergh and seasoned by the Coens, the apotheosis of sympathetic indifference, whether comically running in flip flops or showing a rare display of anger at his wife's bedside. It is very easy to pick out which scenes Clooney prepared for, and in which he seems to rest on his laurels. Payne's films have all rested on sad-faced leading performances that grow more complex as they reach a climax. It's hard to look at a man with Clooney's looks and his character's wealth in the same way we saw Matthew Broderick's pathetic history teacher in Election. And as for the sale of the land, well, it is awards season and this is Hollywood - you can probably guess Matt's decision.

With this big a whole running through the center of the film, I am forced to praise the accoutrements. Woodley gives a believable if not likable performance as the older daughter. Robert Forster, Beau Bridges and Matthew Lillard each pack multi-tiered character arcs into a minimum of screen-time. As a way of bucking the cliches of the elegy sub-genre, it is refreshing to not suffer expository flashbacks of a marriage hitting the rocks, and whatever incident that sent Alexandra to a boarding school a plane-ride away from her parents. When I find myself praising my film for NOT making a mistake however, it cannot have been all that enjoyable.

The Descendants is the first Payne film that does not announce itself outright as a comedy with slapstick (think Nicholson going shopping in a bathrobe driving a Winnebago, or the adventure to retrieve Thomas Haden Church's engagement ring). However, it relies too often on more obvious laughs, such as a ten year old girl flipping someone the bird. These feel less organic to the material and more like little breaks from the Serious Issues At Hand, like Family and The Environment. In the past, Payne's films have felt improvisational, uncontrolled and natural expressions of ambivalent emotion. It may be the stiffness of Clooney's performance, or the inevitable road to redemption movies seem to follow this time of year, but this movie never has time to meander or wink. The final shot is a return to normalcy; whether this film will get a return on my part is doubtful.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

On a misty early morning in the Catskills, two men build an enclosure to hold livestock. This opening shot would not be so disturbing were the story that follows not told from the perspective of the animal in captivity. The men are acolytes of a cult leader named Patrick (John Hawkes), who ensnares girl after girl with abandonment issues in his flock. What the purpose of the makeshift family is remains unclear, as does a great deal of the background of these characters. We only have the word of Martha, later Marcy May, and occasionally, Marlene (Elizabeth Olsen), to go on and she has, after all, been brainwashed.

It is standard operating procedure for a movie whose protagonist has experienced a mental breakdown to alternate between two different time periods. Martha Marcy May Marlene does not differ in structure from films like Memento and Spider, except that both plotlines occur post break. We never see "Martha", the pre-cult teenager. In one story, she's already one of the girls on the farm; in the other, she struggles to reacclamate to society under the watchful eye of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). Through her eyes, her dreams and her memories, it is impossible to get a clear impression of either the past or the present. She is damaged irreparably, but whether that is Patrick's fault, or someone else's, is left largely to the imagination.

Lucy and Martha's relationship that provides the explanation for the latter's willingness to lose herself. One is a tightly wound careerist; the other an absent minded girl tangled in her own mind. This isn't just because one of them has been sharing clothes and a bed with a dozen other drugged housegirls. Writer-director Sean Durkin treat's Patrick's hideaway as just another part of a disturbed person's life - it is not the circumstance, but the psyche that is unsettled. Martha Marcy May Marlene spends its time at the edges of the situation, concerned with root causes.

Of course the objective observer in us will have to ask - just what are Hawkes and company up to? Durkin gets a great deal of unsettling mileage out of one of the film's opening images. The men set around the table eating, while the girls and women wait in the hallway; when the men finish and exit the dining room, the women sit around the same table, more cramped. No one speaks. The 21st century liberal in all of us recoils at the obvious iniquity, and without any animal sacrifice or genital mutilation, we're dead set against whatever Patrick and his cronies have in mind. There are a few more incidents that may make your skin crawl, but from Marcy May's perspective, these may not be any worse than Lucy and Ted's insistence on keeping feet off of furniture and engaging in polite conversation at a cocktail party.

Martha Marcy May Marlene would be nothing without the haunted, volatile performance by Olsen, whose thousand mile stares and sudden rages dictate the mood of any given scene. Even the film's faded Polaroid look mirrors Olson's long eroded personality. There are not any Oscar trolling "I'm losing my mind" scenes - it's long gone. This may be frustrating to some, as Marcy May is so far gone we never get the full picture. Durkin leaves his final shot in mid thought, Martha wandering on.

Whether lyrically incomplete or intentionally frustrating, Martha Marcy May Marlene certainly leaves us wanting from a narrative standpoint. One could go on for longer than the films running time once the credits roll unpacking the film's unanswered questions and unsatisfying, self-contained explanations. At least Durkin has taken us halfway there - in Marlene there is an economy of image and atmosphere that makes what we do see stick with us. The film announced itself six months ago with this haunting trailer - I can't say the whole experience goes much beyond this. The short cut raises feelings of uncommon empathy, curiosity and dread. Unfortunately, the finished product fails to put those back to rest.