Part of the issue with director and co-writer Matt Brown’s Freud’s Last Session is that it can’t decide what the central core of its story actually is. Certainly, a film doesn’t have to be about just one thing to be a success. But this film (based on the play by Mark St. Germain, who also wrote the film with Brown) feels like it’s losing focus almost from the second it begins throwing us into this fictionalized conversation between Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), the founder of psychoanalysis in the last months of his life, and author C.S. Lewis (played by Matthew Goode), the writer of The Chronicles of Narnia books. It is known that Freud met with a theology expert in the period just before World War II broke out (he died in 1939), and some have speculated that it might have been Lewis, so the play and now the film run with that idea.
Lewis was known as a deeply religious man, so the two got together to debate the small matter of the existence of God. But just as the conversation gets interesting, it’s interrupted by any number of things, many of which are connected to Freud’s failing health from oral cancer. He receives medication (and other narcotics); his lesbian daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) shows up as she does every day; air raid sirens blare; or Freud simply needs a break, causing the flow of their meeting to be staggered at best. The film braids the past, present and bits of familiar fantasy as the men talk in Freud’s study, and when Freud’s Last Session zeroes in on this discussion, it’s at its best. Unfortunately, Lewis' unconventional love affair with his best friend’s mother distracts them (and us) from simply allowing these two powerhouse actors from getting on with the business of figuring out the whole God thing (admittedly, Hopkins' weird Austrian accent doesn’t exactly help keep things focused either).
To keep the name-dropping finely tuned, Stephen Campbell Moore plays JRR Tolkein, more for the vibe than to add anything interesting to the mix. The speculative nature of the conversation doesn’t distract from the film’s authenticity. Clearly the playwright knows his characters, their philosophies and their work enough to fabricate their talking points, and it can be fascinating at times, even if Freud tends to dominate the debate with this “Christian apologist” (as Anna called Lewis). It should come as no surprise that the occasional interesting point is made by both men, but their talk seems distracted by the times themselves—few people had the luxury of such discussions when Hitler is charging through Europe straight at them. Just as the wheels start turning, they run off the rails. It doesn’t help that Freud refuses to acknowledge his daughter’s sexual preference as anything other than a mental imbalance. Freud’s Last Session is an exercise in frustration, and a gentle reminder that fine acting can’t erase a disjointed screenplay.
The film is now in theaters.
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