Review: 'Freud's Last Session' promises an intellectual prizefight, but its stars barely get to lace up their gloves
If you’re going to stage a false meeting of minds, as the turgid drama “Freud’s Last Session” does, the least a filmmaker can do is deliver on the premise and really let two famous intellectual figures — in this case, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the author C.S. Lewis — go at it with their philosophical A-game.
The script — adapted from Mark St. Germain’s play by director Matthew Brown and St. Germain — imagines a probably fictitious meeting in London between Freud and Lewis, set on Sept. 3, 1939. This date is important for several reasons: It’s two days after the Nazis invaded Poland, it’s the night when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that a state of war existed between Germany and the United Kingdom, and it’s three weeks before Freud, suffering from oral cancer, would die (it’s suggested by physician-assisted suicide).
Why would Lewis, an Oxford don and Christian apologist, visit Freud at the London home where he’s lived for 16 months, ever since escaping Vienna with his daughter, child psychologist Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries)? The script tells us Freud invited Lewis, because Lewis had spoofed Freud with a character in a book, a satire of John Bunyan’s “A Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Beyond that, they would seem to have little in common. Freud, raised Jewish, was an atheist who talked freely about human sexuality, while Lewis (though atheist in his younger days) was a converted Christian who wrote about the existence of God — and, unlike Freud, didn’t care to discuss bedroom matters in casual conversation.
So Brown and St. Germain are setting us up for a historical version of “My Dinner With Andre,” a no-holds-barred conversation in which these two mental powerhouses debate the existence or nonexistence of God, right? That might have been more interesting that what we get.
Certainly the actors — Anthony Hopkins as the irascible Freud and Matthew Goode as the thoughtful but restrained Lewis — seem game. There are moments where they start digging in, talking about whether the Bible is accurate history or just amassed folklore. But those moments are brief bursts within the sluggish melodrama that’s structured around the two men.
An air raid siren, and an emergency visit to a bomb shelter, trigger Lewis’ PTSD (they’d call it “shell shock” in that era) from his experience in the trenches during World War I. A prosthetic in Freud’s mouth causes the old man pain, and he’s running low on the morphine he’s taking to function. And there’s the backstory of Freud’s complicated relationship with Anna — and her equally complicated relationship with another psychologist, Dorothy Burlingham, who lived with the Freuds in Vienna and moved to London with them. (The script is more sure of Anna and Dorothy’s personal status than many historians are.)
Brown tries to make the story look broader than its stage-based roots, and after a few flashbacks and dream sequences — yes, putting a dream in a movie about Freud is asking for trouble — the viewer wishes the movie would quit trying so hard to be dimly lit and dramatic, and just let the main characters talk. There are some arresting intellects in “Freud’s Last Session,” but they’re left stranded by a story that’s unworthy of their eloquence and brainpower.
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‘Freud’s Last Session’
★★
Opens Friday, January 19, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some bloody/violent images, sexual material and smoking. Running time: 108 minutes.