Make money doing the work you believe in
I watched two films about psychoanalysis, A Dangerous Method (2011) and Freud’s Last Session (2023).
A Dangerous Method dealt with the relationship between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, who started out as Jung’s patient before becaming his lover for a couple years as she became a noted analyst in her own right, while she also became a colleague of Freud. Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortenson portrayed Jung and Freud, respectively, while Keira Knightley was miscast as Spielrein - her acting wasn’t very good. For those who want to understand a bit of the relationship between Jung and Freud, as well as Otto Gross’s impact on Jung, it’s a decent film. 5/10.
Freud's Last Session was a fictional account of Freud's final psychoanalysis session with C.S. Lewis before Freud killed himself (as he was painfully suffering from incurable mouth cancer). It was not a good movie; it was very talky and pretty boring, based on an underlying play, and I didn't care about the subplot of Freud's daughter's lesbian sexuality in the slightest. The movie discusses the problem of evil and the nature of God, which was somewhat more interesting. A Dangerous Method was better because it showed more than it told. 4/10.
Anyway, Freud was played here by Anthony Hopkins, and it was interesting to contrast his portrayal with Viggo Mortenson's. Hopkins portrays Freud with much more of a dynamic personality than Mortenson's flat, subdued portrayal, although Mortenson looked like Freud a lot more than Hopkins does. However, neither of these actors (both non-Jews) contain the level of neurosis that I would expect from a Jewish actor portraying Jewish Freud (you can see a brief audio/video of Freud here: youtube.com/watch?v=Jan… ).
It is interesting the choice taken by these mainstream films to portray these historical figures through the eyes of their women, I guess to broaden their commercial appeal, but it’s not an approach I really appreciated.
