The idea of making a film about Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the legendary founder of psychoanalysis, is not immediately attractive.
The film is a great drama, but closet drama, in which most of the action takes place within the mind. The question is how to translate this action into a viable script that would produce a
film from which audiences would not flee?
Film makers discovered three ways to make the tragicomedy of Freud's heroic years filmworthy. First, they depict Freud thinking to himself as he stalks around Vienna at night, in top hat and overcoat. This technique of dramatizing historic though processes led them to have Montgomery Clift, who portrays Freud, do a great deal of staring.
What Freud does relatively well is depict a brilliant man's search--even though his discoveries, like Charcot's treatments of hysterics, come a bit too easily and too casually.
However, for anyone eager to establish a useful timetable of early psychoanalysis, a good biography remains indispensable...
September 14, 2009
