Freud’s Last Session

IT’S BECOMING something of a pattern: every time Anthony Hopkins wins an Oscar, he goes on to star in a movie about C.S. Lewis.Thirty years ago, after winning his first trophy for Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins played Lewis in Shadowlands, a movie about Lewis’s late-in-life romance with Joy Davidman Gresham

Posted Date : 2024-05-23 20:10:00

Reviewed by Peter T. Chattaway

IT’S BECOMING something of a pattern: every time Anthony Hopkins wins an Oscar, he goes on to star in a movie about C.S. Lewis.

Thirty years ago, after winning his first trophy for Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins played Lewis in Shadowlands, a movie about Lewis’s late-in-life romance with Joy Davidman Gresham.

Now, just a few years after winning his second award for The Father, Hopkins stars in Freud’s Last Session, which imagines what might have happened if Lewis, the Oxford don who converted from atheism to Christianity, had met Sigmund Freud, the Jewish atheist who founded psychoanalysis – except this time, Hopkins is playing Freud, not Lewis (who is played in this film by Downton Abbey’s Matthew Goode).

There is no evidence that the real Lewis and Freud ever met but, conveniently, Freud did spend the last year of his life in England. So, it is relatively easy to put the two men together; all it takes is a train ride from Oxford to London.

What’s more, Freud died only a few weeks after World War II began, so the film is set on the third day of the conflict, as the Brits wait to see how their government will respond to Germany’s invasion of Poland. The imminent violence and chaos of the period lends a certain urgency to Freud and Lewis’s debate over matters like whether God exists and, if so, how there can be so much suffering in the world.

The film, directed and co-written by Matthew Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity), is based on a play by Mark St. Germain which was, in turn, inspired by The Question of God, a 2002 book by Dr. Armand Nicholi, Jr. that was turned into a PBS documentary in 2004. 

Nicholi, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, argued that Freud, with his materialistic atheism, and Lewis, with his Christian theism, represented different ways of approaching the world and finding meaning within it.

Nicholi didn’t exactly pit the two men against each other and ask his audience to take a side; instead, he argued that Freud and Lewis represent “conflicting parts of ourselves,” and the documentary based on his book created a sort of dialogue between them. At certain points, actors playing Lewis and Freud sat in a study and recited passages from each man’s writings while the camera cut back and forth between them.

Freud’s Last Session is essentially a feature-length version of those clips, but where the documentary put the two men on roughly equal footing, the film does two things that put Lewis at a significant disadvantage.

First, it constrains itself by aiming for a kind of historical plausibility.

Freud was born over 40 years before Lewis, and he died just as Lewis’s writing career was taking off. The documentary was free to juxtapose the ideas of both men even though their works were written decades apart, but the film has to take place while Freud is still alive – and Lewis, at this point, had written just a few books. He had not yet found the fame that would follow the 1940s BBC radio talks that were eventually published as Mere Christianity.

Thus, Freud, at 83, has age and reputation on his side, while Lewis, at 40, is just an up-and-coming academic who has basically been summoned to the famous intellectual’s home. He even gets a bit apologetic about the fact that he made fun of Freudianism in one of his earliest books (i.e. 1933’s The Pilgrim’s Regress).

Second, the film “opens things up” to make the play more cinematic – more visual and dramatic – and some of its decisions work to Freud’s benefit more than Lewis’s, or at least they give Freud more presence than Lewis.

Both men get flashbacks and dream sequences that hint at their inner lives, but the film also creates an elaborate new subplot in which Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) has to work up the courage to be more open about her lesbianism around her father. Even Freud’s dreams and flashbacks keep coming back to this topic.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t make too much of this plot element, but it’s remarkable how often the film itself keeps returning to it, particularly given that the play and the book that inspired it barely even mention Anna. Roger Ebert once said you can tell what a film is about by what changes between the beginning and the end, and Anna’s growing boldness is the closest thing this film has to a dramatic arc.

Meanwhile, Lewis’s private life gets some awkward scrutiny, too. In flashbacks, we see how a teenaged Lewis (Rhys Mannion) got to know Janie Moore (Orla Brady), the mother of a friend who died during the First World War – and it is strongly suggested that Lewis and Janie became lovers, at least before Lewis converted to Christianity.

The film does allow for the possibility that the relationship between them became platonic after his conversion, even though they continued to live together, but either way, the middle-aged Lewis doesn’t want to talk about it – and certainly not with Freud, who seems to enjoy making him squirm. (Freud doesn’t quite say, “Tell me about your friend’s mother…” but he comes awfully close.)

Some of Lewis’s Christian fans might object to the fact that the film gets into this aspect of his life, but I have to admit, I kind of liked it, at least in principle. We’ve seen plenty of films that dramatize Lewis’s religious conversion for apologetic purposes, but it helps to remember that he was a person, warts and all, and that – as Trevin Wax put it at The Gospel Coalition – “the relationship that once provided an occasion for sin” might have been turned by God into the occasion for Lewis’s “sanctification.”

The larger issue here is that Freud’s Last Session loses sight of why Nicholi juxtaposed Freud and Lewis in the first place. Nicholi used the stories of these two men to look outwards at the bigger picture – to look at questions about God and pain and the meaning of life. The film follows the opposite trajectory; it has been sold as a debate between two deep thinkers, but it turns inward and gets sidetracked, even overwhelmed, by biographical details that were never part of the original project.   TAP

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