R, 1 hr. 33 min. Directed By:
David Cronenberg. Release Date:
Nov 23, 2011.
I've been panting to see this movie ever since I did the LAMBcast about David Cronenberg, which must have been in late spring or early summer in 2011. I didn't exactly love Cronenberg's early works in the 80s and 90, but the man took a serious turn for the good after the turn of the millennium. When I finally started seeing trailers for this in late summer, I was still interested, but I was a bit more hesitant. I shouldn't have been. Cronenberg delivers a pretty awesome film... although I can't say that this is the kind of movie that folks looking for pure entertainment are going to want to see. I found it to be an interesting, erotic drama (the second such movie for Michael Fassbender in the last few months), but I'm not sure that I'd run around recommending it to everyone I know.
When I discussed this on the LAMBcast, there were lots of concerns about Keira Knightley. I like her, but I mostly like looking at her. I've found her work to be sort of a toss up: when she's good, she's really good, and when she's bad it's painful. You also never know what you're going to get, so I couldn't say just by looking at the role whether or not she'd be good. I found her performance here to be... disturbing and occasionally great, but only in strange places. Her physical manifestations of mental illness were distracting, and I'm not sure what we were supposed to be seeing, but I ended up missing most of her early discussions with Fassbender because I was wondering what in the hell she was doing with her jaw. Her Russian accent was good until she hit words with more than two syllables, and then it crumbled to dust, much like a vampire in the light of day. By the end of the movie, it sounds like she's settled for something vaguely central European. Could be anything from Russian to Czech to Albanian.
I didn't like Mortensen at all. He felt stiff and unnatural in this role. I was more than a little glad that his time on screen was relatively short, although I did think that this might have been a better performance from him if they'd focused more on the relationship between Freud and Jung and less on Fassbender flogging Keira Knightley. Fassbender, on the other hand, was good. I liked him in this role almost as much as I liked him in Shame a few weeks ago... and frankly, I really liked that he kept his junk in his pants.
What I didn't realize about this was that it was based on a true story, or at least, the three major players were all real, and they had some sort of relationship. That always just jives well with me. It makes what might be a dull tale a bit more lively, and I don't know why. When the screen fades to black and we're given a short post-film biography of each of the three characters, what I had originally thought was a very long 90 minutes perked up a bit, and now that I've had time to think about it, this is the best example of one of those movies that is good, but isn't fun.
