- Matthew Brown’s feature imagines an impassioned, if at times tangled, conversation about religion, love and sex between the father of psychoanalysis and CS Lewis
Anthony Hopkins in Freud’s Last Session
After premiering at AFI Fest last year, Matthew Brown’s Freud’s Last Session screened in the Special Screenings section of the 35th Dinard British and Irish Film Festival. The original source for this work is the book The Question of God by Armand M Nicholi Jr, in which the psychiatrist contrasted the often-opposed views of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and those of writer and theologian CS Lewis regarding the existence of God, the nature of love and sex, and the meaning of life. Later, that book inspired the play Freud’s Last Session by Mark St Germain, which in turn inspired Brown, who collaborated with St Germain on the screenplay. In the play, as in the film, a fictional yet probable encounter between the two thinkers takes place, allowing their theoretical disagreement to come alive.
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Two days after the start of World War II, a sickly Freud (Anthony Hopkins) receives the young Oxford don CS Lewis (Matthew Goode) in the London home into which he recently and reluctantly moved (recreated in a studio in Dublin; the real last home of the Freud family is in Hampstead and has been turned into a museum). The city is in a state of panic, since Germany has invaded Poland, and Freud, together with his daughter Anna (German actress Liv Lisa Fries, seen in the series Babylon Berlin), is worried about what this could mean for their future. Lewis arrives to confront Freud primarily about his denial of God’s existence, a topic that feels oddly relevant to both men in that frightening context full of uncertainty and the threat of violence. Immediately, the doctor proves as provocative and bold as in his writings and tells Lewis that he should “grow up” and stop believing in a magic man in the sky. But Lewis is determined not to take these remarks personally and pushes the doctor to reconsider his beliefs (or lack thereof).
Hopkins plays Freud as a cantankerous yet playful man, who seems to have lived too long and seen too much suffering in his own life and in other people’s to bother with niceties, while Goode gives Lewis an openness and a delicate attitude that accentuate the contrast between the two men, to rather enjoyable effect. Nevertheless, Freud’s stubbornness at times feels clichéd, and the script’s meandering structure doesn’t benefit either of the two leads. The men jump from one topic to another without investigating any in very much depth, making one wonder exactly who this film is for: fans of Freud’s (or Lewis’s) theories are likely to be left dissatisfied, while those less familiar with their works won’t have learned much at all. Perhaps in an attempt to reach that second category, the film resorts to well-known (if often misunderstood) Freudisms or psychology talk, such as the idea that “to do the same thing over and over again expecting different results is the sign of insanity” or facile references to dream analysis.
Asking a mainstream drama to encapsulate the complexity of these concepts may be inappropriate, but dramatically speaking, it nevertheless appears that this material was better suited to the stage, where a conversation in one sole room can more easily generate real drama while the outside world feels even more important for being only suggested. In parallel with Freud and Lewis’s conversation, Anna struggles with the misogyny of the psychoanalytic milieu (she would herself become an important practitioner specialising in childhood development) and her own dependent attachment to her father, who rejects her homosexuality, which in reality she continued to deny all her life; while this exploration of Father Freud’s limitations regarding sexuality brings some welcome nuance to this portrait of a great man, it never fully coheres with the rest of the film and feels rather tokenistic, like an unconvincing attempt to modernise two figures who were already very much ahead of their time, albeit not as liberated as people today.
Freud’s Last Session is a US-UK-Irish co-production staged by WestEnd Films and Subotica, while its international sales are handled by WestEnd Films.
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