AP – Freud’s Last Session, starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, adds to a string of sterling late-chapter performances by the 86-year-old actor. He was the soul of Armageddon Time, the reason to see The Father and the papal foil to Jonathan Pryce’s Pope Francis in The Two Popes.
With the exception of James Gray’s more cinematically composed Armageddon Time, the movies have offered simple, stagy showcases for Hopkins, a lion in winter.
Freud’s Last Session, which expands in theatres this weekend, also comes from the stage and, like The Two Popes, centres on the tete-a-tete of intellectual opposites. Mark St Germain’s 2009 two-character play brought together Freud and C S Lewis (played by Matthew Goode in the film) for a speculative meeting between the two in 1939 London.
An aged Freud, suffering from oral cancer, prepares to receive the Oxford academic at his London home while war with Germany is growing inevitable. The factual jumping off point is that Freud, three weeks before his death, is recorded as meeting with an unnamed Oxford don.
As Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) prepares to leave in the morning, he mentions Lewis’ impending arrival. “The Christian apologist?” she responded. “Yah,” he chuckles.
Their conversation, which makes up the bulk of the film, imagines a spiritual debate between the father of psychoanalysis, a proud man of science, and the theological Lewis, a believer who in the years after Freud’s Last Session takes place would pen his apologetic novel The Screwtape Letters and, later, the fantasy parables of The Chronicles of Narnia.
If their adverse positions didn’t make for enough drama, air raid sirens are sounding and Freud’s health is bad enough that he, in between dripping morphine into his drink, several times eyes a suicide pill during the day. Death and history buffer their talk of a higher being, fear and pain.
But the elements never quite cohere in Freud’s Last Session. The rhythm of conversation feels choppy and lacks the probing give and take that can electrify a two-hander.
Freud – or is it Hopkins? – so dominates their talk. Goode, with less to chew on, remains more observational and removed for his Lewis to ever fully engage Freud.
Director Matthew Brown, who shares screenwriting credit with St Germain, has artificially “opened up” the play to include flashbacks and side plots.
Yet Anna’s story, including a relationship with a woman, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), not acknowledged by her father, is too complex to graft into the theological debate.
It feels like a movie in its own right. That Freud’s Last Session is overly murky in shadows also contributes to the movie’s lack of clarity.
But Freud and Lewis’ dialogue sometimes finds compelling points of commonality. Fantasy figures prominently into both minds – Freud in his analysis of dreams and Lewis in the dreamworlds he’ll create. And both come to their beliefs in part from childhood experiences that colour their lives.
“I have only two words to offer humanity: Grow up,” said Freud. – Jake Coyle
