FREUD'S LAST SESSION - Mark Reviews Movies

Freud's Last Session, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 21, 2023

There's no direct evidence that the meeting at the heart of Freud's Last Session ever took place, but if we were to dismiss this act of dramatic license on the basis of a lack of facts, we might as well throw out the entire history of literature and drama. That's not the problem with this movie, anyway. It's that screenwriters Mark St. Germain, adapting his play, and Matthew Brown put two brilliant men in the same room and have them talk in circles, around both the same subjects and each other.

It doesn't matter that the premise—of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis having a tête-à-tête right at the start of Great Britain's involvement in World War II—might not be authentic. The extended conversation itself never feels fully authentic. These two talk in such a way that one can sense the writer behind the discussion, guiding and, at times, forcing them into exactly the subjects and tactics that will provide the most drama and some basic information about the characters.

The movie, directed with an equal lack of subtlety by Brown, doesn't trust us to understand who these two men are, why they're important in their respective fields, and how their worldviews would clash without much of a push. Even so, the screenplay pushes and pushes, making them talk about the biggest questions of humanity and divinity—or the lack thereof—without ever giving us a sense that they exist for any other reason but to be mouthpieces in this chamber piece.

On a positive note, the material is initially fascinating and the central performances convey such deep-seated intelligence that it almost works against the movie's favor. Anthony Hopkins plays a Freud who's near the end of his life (The real man would die within a month of this imagined meeting). Even so, he's fiercely opinionated and stubborn, despite the occasional doddering, physical pain, and moments of forgetfulness. One could joke that Freud apparently forgets his Austrian accent after a few minutes, but Hopkins' presence is too commanding to make it.

Meanwhile, Matthew Goode plays Lewis, currently a don at Oxford University and a relatively recent convert to Christianity. Freud here introduces Lewis to himself as a Christian apologist, before adding, in the sort of on-the-nose cleverness that the script so often succumbs to, "You certainly have a lot to apologize for." Would Freud make such a joke? He might have, but it's the way the character sets up his own punch line that makes it come across as such a writerly tic and not a piece of natural conversation.

Goode plays Lewis with an equal degree of being opinionated and stubborn, but the actor brings a polite softness to the role that makes the dichotomy here a bit easier to accept. If it were just two men speaking in hushed tone or yelling at each other constantly, we'd see the script's trickery more easily. The two actors, though, play off each other well as sort of intellectual flip sides of both opinion and personality.

The setup is, well, simple and an obvious excuse for a string of debates and minimal biographical details. Lewis arrives at Freud's home on account of a misunderstanding, believing he has invited a different Oxford scholar—or maybe that's just a power play on the psychoanalyst's part. Almost immediately, they get into the meat of the debate: Is there a divine power who created and is overseeing the universe?

Lewis believes there is, and it is the Christian deity, although he still has a lot of questions with which to grapple about that. Freud, slowly and painfully dying of jaw cancer, doesn't believe, although his office is surrounded with statues and token of assorted religions of various cultures throughout history. Lewis thinks that has to mean something about the doctor's faith, and Freud thinks the fact that the writer thinks that means something about him.

There's a lot of roundabout logic here, which is fine, given that it's not as if this imagined conversation is going to answer any of the big questions by the end, and quickly repetitive. Is this really the extent of the scriptwriters' imagination about what two great minds would say to each other in the same room?

There's a world war about to start officially, after all, and while they do speak of the horrors of combat, it's mostly to establish that Lewis is a veteran of the Great War and still suffers from the trauma of that experience. Sex comes up, too, of course, since Freud is involved. That line of discussion, though, is often played as a joke or with sinister implications about the doctor's relationship with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries). In a subplot clearly designed to get out of the office, she's running around London looking for morphine for her father and deciding whether or not to tell him about her romantic relationship with Dorothy (Jodi Balfour).

There are no answers to be found about the debate or the contradictions of the characters in Freud's Last Session. Part of that is to be expected, but more of it might be that the filmmakers are posing the wrong questions about what this meeting would be like.

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