THERE MIGHT NOT be a hotter ticket at this year’s film fest than A Dangerous Method, which stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung. The actors are red-carpet mainstays, but the real attraction for T.O. movie-goers is the guy behind the camera: David Cronenberg, now entering his fifth decade as the only Canadian director whose last name also doubles as an adjective. (To call a film “Cronenbergian” implies something violent, visceral, visionary.)
The simple way to describe the Forest Hill resident’s career would be to say that he’s moved from gross-outs to galas. In the 1970s, icky, low-budget horror films like Shivers and Rabid wowed midnight movie crowds and outraged cultural gatekeepers like Robert Fulford, who penned an angry anti-Cronenberg screed in the pages of Saturday Night. Less than a decade later, however, the director had proved that he had more stamina than his critics, channelling his obsessions with fractured psyches and damaged bodies into box-office hits (The Fly) critical smashes (Dead Ringers) and censor-baiting provocations (Crash). The disconnect between the elegantly grotesque images on screen and the seemingly mild-mannered artist behind them prompted dozens of articles.
“People sometimes talk as though you have a checklist of stuff,” he told me in 2005 before the TIFF premiere of A History of Violence, a smoothly disturbing thriller with gooey, gory elements. “Like, you know, ‘Wait a minute, there aren’t enough body portals here,’ or whatever.” The director’s insistence that he’s trying not to repeat certain themes is fair enough, although it’s hard not to think about the similarities between Videodrome and eXistenZ — both about virtual reality run amok — or note that A Dangerous Method is the third film he’s made with Mortensen, whose close-to-the-vest acting complements Cronenberg’s cerebral style perfectly.
“I’ve often said that you make a movie to discover why you want to make a movie,” said Cronenberg during an interview at FanExpo 2010, as if anticipating concerns that the period-piece premise of a A Dangerous Method seems a little genteel for a director once dubbed “the baron of blood.”
Cronenberg’s film Cosmopolis has just wrapped, and he’ll soon be directing a cinematic version of Jonathan Lethem’s novel As She Climbed Across the Table, about a man in love with a black hole. It sounds strange, perverse and provocative — in other words, perfectly Cronenbergian.