MOVIE INFO:
On the eve of the Second World War, two of the greatest minds on the twentieth century, C.S. LEWIS and SIGMUND FREUD converge for their own personal battle over the existence of God. FREUD’S LAST SESSION interweaves the lives of Freud and Lewis, past, present, and through fantasy, bursting from the confines of Freud’s study on a dynamic journey.
REVIEW:
The Freud (Anthony Hopkins) of Freud’s Last Session is a man on in his last legs. He’s dying from the oral cancer he’s battled for sixteen year. Maybe, a man having doubts about his own atheist beliefs in the face of his mortal reckoning? So he does an experiment of sorts, invites the former atheist and now premier Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) over to debate God’s existence. What develops is a chartty drama, relieved with fine performances. The war of minds and souls collides with the literal start of World War II playing in spurts on the radio and the roar of British fighters in the air.
Medicating the pain of life with morphine- the drug that Freud would terminate his mortality brief weeks later- and facing it bravely and faithfully despite the evidence of an indifferent God, the old deist/atheist debate, is the grounding theme of Last Session. Is religion the opiate of the people or the opiate of the fool cum wiseman who doesn’t believe in anything beyond himself? The movie is a polite stalemate that never gives a definite answer.
Of course, their Oedipal complexes and family attachments would come to the fore. They will even psychosnslyze each other, literally taking turns on the transformation couch. For Freud, the debate is a distraction from pain and his pending death. For Lewis it’s another test of his faith in the presence of scientific fact and disbelief.
Last Session is based on the Mark St. Germain stage play of 2011 (which in turn was inspired by Armand Nicholi’s 2002 The Question of God). The director, Matt Brown has a hard time delivering this mainly two hander without artifice, and within the classical a day structure. The subplot involving Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), a psychoanalyst and closet lesbian in love with a fellow psychoanalyst, Dorothy (Jodi Balfour), and her quest to find her father’s much depended on morphine before the pharmacies close adds strained psychological drama and an illustration of Freud’s own defined attachment syndrome in action. In showing Freud the victim of his own neurosis, Last Session becomes too smart for its own good.
Hopkins delivers his usual lively performance. But he has the deeper character on which to build on. In return, Goode as Lewis, comes off looking worse. He is often portrayed as the mouse being toyed with by Freud’s catty arguments and intellect. Numerous flashbacks to both’s childhoods fill out their psychoanalytical profiles and how they came to their beliefs. For Lewis it was through an act of kindness for the widow of a fallen comrade. For Freud, it’s the firing of his Catholic nanny by his Orthodox Jewish father. This resentment of his father often rises in the way Freud questions and interrogates Lewis’ about his ambiguous sexual persona.
Freud’s own statement stands as a slight damnation of Last Session. I consider what people tell me less fascinating than what they choose not to tell me. Still, Lewis gets an unexpected and well earned stalemate in this chess game. “One of us is the fool,” Sigmund says, of the questions that lie at the heart of the film: Does God exist? And if so, why could such a creator allow evil? Is the latter proof or negation of the former? “If you’re right, you won’t be able to tell me so,” Sigmund continues, presumably referring to the finality of death. “And if I’m right, no one will ever know.”
Freud’s Last Session gets a 3.0/5 or a B. It’s streaming on Netflix.
CREDITS:
Directed by
Matthew Brown
Screenplay by
- Mark St. Germain
- Matthew Brown
Based on
Freud’s Last Session
by Mark St. Germain
Produced by
- Alan Greisman
- Rick Nicita
- Meg Thomson
- Hannah Leader
- Tristan Orpen Lynch
- Robert Stillman
- Matthew Brown
Starring
Cinematography
Ben Smithard
Edited by
Paul Tothill
Music by
Coby Brown
Production
companies
- Fís Éireann / Screen Ireland
- Last Session Productions
- Subotica Productions
- 14 Sunset
Distributed by
- Sony Pictures Classics (Select territories)
- Vertigo Releasing[1](United Kingdom and Ireland)
Release dates
- 27 October 2023(AFI)
- 22 December 2023(United States)
- 14 June 2024(United Kingdom)
Running time
122 minutes[2]
Countries
Language
English
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