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.
As with all historical fiction, Freud’s Last Session’s basic conceit requires a reason for its existence. What do viewers gain from imagined words traded by famous academic men? The film won’t deepen anyone’s relationship to or familiarity with Freud or Lewis, though bless Brown for trying to mine profundity from such a wildly fabricated scenario; putting words in the mouths of these guys takes a certain degree of chutzpah, which is easier to appreciate by dint of the film’s banality. The film’s observations, as filtered through the duo, feel utterly simplistic, and gain gravity only by the enthusiasm in Goode and Hopkins’ performances.
At least Ben Smithard’s photography is sharp. Freud’s Last Session looks rich and detailed, full of images so thoughtfully composed that they could be framed in museums. (One in particular, of Anna propped against the wall of a prison cell, where a cohort of Nazis briefly keep her during one of the film’s more useless sequences, is stunning in terms of texture and blocking.) This is the awards-season release where the budget goes the furthest on screen in terms of enriching an otherwise dutifully rigid production. Given the thought exercise Brown is engaged in, the action feels remarkably stiff, as if hobbled by either resignation to its own briefness or simply an inspiration block.
Conjuring what words Freud and Lewis might have for each other appears daunting to Brown, even though the hard part – the script – has already been done for him. Maybe this material should’ve stayed on stage. Cutting away from the main event to secondary material sucks the energy out of the room, an expense the film can’t spare; if the task is to invent a dialogue for its chief characters, then setting that dialogue aside, even for a minute, is terribly unwise, like interrupting a barbeque with a buffet salad bar. But this could all be tolerable, even pleasurable, without the admission of guilt provided in Freud’s Last Session’s parting message. We know what we’re watching is sensationalism. Brown isn’t suppose to say so out loud.
Director: Matt Brown
Writer: Matt Brown, Mark St. Germain
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Fries, Jodi Balfour, Orla Brady
Release Date: December 22, 2023
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.