Freud’s Last Session | Now playing | ★★★
Freud’s Last Session, the talky and cerebral U.K. film in theaters this week, is the kind of movie we don’t see much anymore. Adapted from a stage play, it’s a movie about two people talking—in this case, two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
The setup is intriguing. Set in the anxious days before World War II, the script imagines an extended London encounter between world-famous neurologist Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and author C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), the Oxford scholar and theologian who gave us The Chronicles of Narnia.
Did this auspicious summit actually take place? Probably not, but maybe. Historians tell us that Freud did indeed meet with “a famed Oxford don” around this time, in his London home.
It’s a delicious slice of conjecture. Lewis was, at the time, the world’s most famous Christian thinker and apologist, which in this context just means an advocate and public defender. Freud, of course, was an avowed atheist, man of science, and the father of psychoanalysis.
“I am a passionate disbeliever who is obsessed with ancient belief,” he tells Lewis in the film. “Yours included.”
As you might imagine, it’s a pretty good discussion. Freud and Lewis cover a lot of ground. God. Death. Free will. Sex. Despair. Fathers. Daughters. War. Morphine. Dental prostheses. And, of course, cigars. Freud calls Christianity a “ludicrous dream, an insidious lie.” Lewis stands his ground. “You don’t have to be an imbecile to believe in God,” he says. “Those of who do are not suffering from an obsessional neurosis.”
The film is strictly even-handed and gives each man’s perspective equal time and rhetorical weight. The dialogue is heightened, and screenwriter Mark St.Germain’s use of language is gorgeous. Meanwhile, director Matthew Brown stitches in some new threads to open up the stagy nature of the script. (It’s still pretty stagy.) Freud, we learn, is suffering from terminal oral cancer and some deep regrets, explored in dream sequences and flashbacks. When air raid sirens send the pair to a nearby church cellar, another brutal flashback sequence explores Lewis’s lingering trauma from World War I.
The most compelling subplot involves Freud’s adult daughter Anna, a fierce thinker in her own right who would go on to pioneer the field of child psychoanalysis. In this film, Freud treats her cruelly, even as she tries to care for him in his final weeks. As Anna, German actress Liv Lisa Fries very nearly steals the film, and I was surprised to find I wanted the story to follow her up and out of that grim London mansion.
The rolling conversation between the men is never less than engaging, and Hopkins holds the frame effortlessly, as always, with those ancient Welsh eyes. But Anna is the character I really cared about, in the end.
Freud’s Last Session is effective as a kind of staged thought experiment, but as a film it never really finds its groove. The visuals are muddy and sometimes gaudy (those dream sequences!), and the intrusive musical score is a sustained bummer. Still, it’s a great opportunity for that noble ritual of after-movie debate.
Why not keep the discussion going? After all, the film raises questions at the very core of the human condition. Those who value the art of good conversation will appreciate the film, I think. You can get to places in dialogue that you just can’t get to in your own head. The best exchange comes near the end.
“It was madness to think we could explain the greatest mystery of all time,” Freud says. “No, there’s a greater madness,” Lewis replies. “Not to think of it at all.”
Comment on this story at [email protected].
Support independent local journalism.
Join the INDY Press Club to help us keep fearless watchdog reporting and essential arts and culture coverage viable in the Triangle.
You must be logged in to post a comment.