A Dangerous Method (2011)

Excuse me, would somebody please get Keira Knightly a sandwich? And maybe a slice of cake?
Let me start by saying that all the actors did a good job, as did the costumers and set designers. I guess you know that when I start a paragraph the way I did, that there will be a "but" coming, so let me not disappoint you. But, I didn't like this movie and that is the fault of the writer and director, well less the former and more the latter I suspect.
This film that went to such great pains for authenticity totally dropped the ball on language, as do most period pieces. Freud (Viggo Mortenson) is Austrian, Jung (Michael Fassbender) is Swiss, and XXX (Keira Knightly) is Russian, yet they all speak in English - which Freud and Jung spoke with very heavy German accents, though not in this movie - which we are asked to believe is German. So German speaking Swiss sound like Brits to the German ear? And Austrians sound like Americans and Russians sound like Brits who sometimes throw in some Russian glottal sounds? At times I think that Mortenson was trying to do a British accent, but at other times he was adding a hint of German. I found this totally off-putting and wish that David Cronenberg would have just picked an accent and had everyone go with that, or even better, made a German-speaking film with subtitles.
The other big area was how flat the characters were. Were Freud and Jung so dispassionate that even in their most heated arguments they sounded like a high school practice debate? Perhaps Cronenberg was trying to point out how gentlemen of that era did not get passionate in public or with friends, but if so he missed the mark as there was no context to put this into. He could have taken a lesson from all the wonderful British dramas set in that time.
Meh. I wanted more about anything in this movie - more about the conflict between Freud and Jung, more about the passion between Jung and XXX, more about Jung's loveless seeming marriage.
I repeat, meh.

A Dangerous Method on IMDB