In A Dangerous Method Viggo Mortensen subdues his own preternatural good looks to play Sigmund Freud. It’s a remarkably humanizing performance. The actor takes this starchy historical figure and portrays him as a pompous, self-satisfied buffoon. In the movie Freud wears a slightly pained expression, as if being such a great thinker hurts. And he’s irritated each time he has to speak because it requires him to remove the cigar from his mouth. To facilitate the transformation the actor has been given a trim beard, dark contact lenses, and a prosthetic nose.
What is it with the prosthetic noses in movies? When Nicole Kidman donned a prosthetic nose to play Virgina Woolf in The Hours it offended me deeply. Woolf is a personal hero I’ve always thought her beautiful, not in a Miss America kind of way, but in an misty, aristocratic, pre-modern kind of way. She was a highly intelligent, highly privileged, and highly sensitive Englishwoman, and that’s exactly what she looked like. Do people really think her nose was an important part of her character, and that giving Nicole Kidman a prosthetic made her more like Virgina Woolf? In photos from the movie Kidman doesn’t look like Woolf at all – she just looks not-Nicole-Kidman. Even harder to bear is that Kidman feels the prosthetic liberated her, as if being conventionally attractive is an affliction. Does the nose help Viggo Mortensen look like Sigmund Freud? Not very much. He could have done without it. You get the sense that the Freud nose is just a part of his costume, and that he loves it as much as he loves his Freud suit, cane and cigar.
