I’m thinking this movie could have been better.
“Freud’s Last Session” is a fictionalized story of Austrian neurologist Siegmund Freud having a meeting with “Chronicles of Narnia” author C.S. Lewis, and has Anthony Hopkins as Freud and Matthew Goode as Lewis. These two actors are very fine in their roles, but the movie doesn’t take full advantage of their chemistry. In their meeting, Freud has Lewis visit him to talk about their different views on God, as Lewis believes in him while Freud is an atheist.
A brilliant movie about a fictionalized meeting is “One Night in Miami,” which wanted to have Sam Cooke, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Malcolm X in the same room. It used the right actors to represent an interesting story, and we were able to be taken into their lives. It didn’t have to be real; it just had to be complex. “Freud’s Last Session” is too cynical and damp to even think about the humanity of these famous people.
Among the other elements in the story, we see Freud’s teacher daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), her worries about her ill father, and her closeted collaboration with Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour). There’s a typical subplot when she’s nearly taken away by Nazis, and then immediately released. She tried to take her ill father’s place, in the tradition of Belle in “Beauty and the Beast,” but it doesn’t last long. You know how it is with young people and their ill parents.
We also go back to Freud’s childhood when he took after his father’s atheism, after spending some time with his Catholic nanny.
We also see that Lewis was in WWI and how he remembers the horrors of war. He and his friend Paddy (George Andrew-Clarke) made a promise to each other that if one of them doesn’t make it, they would take care of each other’s parent. Lewis survives the war, but Paddy’s mother Janie (Orla Brady) doesn’t need him to be her guardian angel.
And you also have Stephen Campbell Moore as J.R.R. Tolkien, who is friends with Lewis, and shares his passion for God’s existence. More of their connection would have spiced things up with the screenplay, which is based on Mark St. Germain’s play, which is based on Armand Nicholi’s book “The Question of God.”
“Freud’s Last Session,” directed by Matt Brown (“The Man Who Knew Infinity”), wants to distinguish who is right and who is wrong about God’s existence, and it isn’t the only one to have this debate. There are different groups of people who agree and disagree, and I agree that God exists. So you can save the pariah attacks against me. And it also has Hopkins and Goode both using their acting abilities to bring out Freud and Lewis’ chemistry and character development. It would seem arbitrary that the best thing about the film are the two leads.
The worst movie I’ve ever seen about atheism was “God’s Not Dead,” which was so cynical, cheap, and cold-hearted that I never looked back at it. I may not be religious, but I believe in God, and acknowledge that maybe some things happen in my life for reasons. I don’t want to make this review into a sermon; but at least admit that “Freud’s Last Session” is better than that unholy nightmare, which isn’t saying much.
For a movie that likes to imagine if Lewis and Freud met in real life, it looks and feels authentic, but it doesn’t think things through. There has to be something more thought-provoking in order to bring out their qualities and difficulties. I think I’ll be canceling my next appointment.
In Select Theaters This Friday