Freud’s Last Session Milks a Thought Exercise Until It Curdles

If there’s a surefire way to encourage your audience to rethink their feelings on your fan-fiction account of the time two incalculably influential men convened for an existential debate about God, it’s by measuring the height of the tall tale just before cutting to credits. “Freud reportedly met with a young, unnamed Oxford don shortly before his death,” reads the epilogue to Matt Brown’s Freud’s Last Session. “We will never know if it was C.S. Lewis.” We will never know, but why not let’s pretend it was! Won’t that be good fun, staging a prickly debate between the father of psychoanalysis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s lesser contemporary?

This is unkind to C.S. Lewis, played by Matthew Goode as sparring partner to Sigmund Freud, played by Anthony Hopkins, who has the time of his life in Brown’s film chewing his way through a Viennese accent while dunking on Lewis’ faith. The Chronicles of Narnia may not be The Lord of the Rings, but its place in the high fantasy canon is beyond dispute, and Lewis’ influence on the form is crystallized through subsequent entries in the genre. He’s good. In Freud’s Last Session’s role reversal, though, he’s the subject of another persuasion of fantasy, the kind that wonders “what if” people who in all likelihood never met, and whose worldviews so conflict with one another, actually did meet and aired out their differences, which are not depicted as divisive enough to preclude their potential friendship in the first place.

What Brown’s adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s stage play (itself an adaptation of clinical professor of psychiatry Armand Nicholi’s book The Question of God) presupposes is that, sometime between Freud’s death and the advent of World War II, the great doctor invited the great-to-be author to his home, where they picked apart belief in God, or lack thereof, and treated one another to psychiatric analysis. On paper the concept is lively regardless of the circumstances: Watching performed embodiments of well-known and revered figures banter over an age-old question about whether or not the man upstairs exists, with supplementary questions about whether he is either all-good or all-powerful if he does, should at least make engaging viewing; insubstantial, perhaps, but vigorous, abetted by the presence of a very game lead duo. 

Freud’s Last Session delivers on that promise, but with hefty caveats. Where the St. Germain play is a chamber piece, featuring Freud and Lewis as its role characters, Brown’s take expands to include Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries), Freud’s long-suffering, dutiful daughter, an accomplished genius in her own right, and Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), Anna’s partner; Dorothy’s role here is as Anna’s scolding conscience, constantly reminding that her loyalty to her father borders on unhealthy. Anna’s all he has, of course, so a little bit of drop-everything allegiance to Freud’s all-consuming needs makes sense. In fact, it makes enough sense that the story of Anna could fill an entire feature on its own, rather than pad the margins on a film about how Lewis and Freud may or may not have bickered over the almighty.