Freud’s Last Session: Narnia versus the Id, Ego and Superego - No One Wins
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
The new film, Freud’s Last Session, starring Anthony Hopkins as the father of psychoanalysis, and Matthew Goode as the author, C.S. Lewis, had a long gestation.
It started with a 1967 course at Harvard by psychiatrist Armond M. Nicholi Jr., which evolved into a course on the atheist Freud and the Christian apologist Lewis, which became a book, a PBS television series, and Mark St. Germain’s hit two-man play, which gave the current film its title.
Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis and Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud
The binary opposition of Freud and Lewis is artificial, given that the two likely never met and were two generations apart. But it’s somewhat fun to imagine the 83-year-old Austrian Jewish doctor - who theorized the Id, Ego and the Superego - matching wits with the Irish-born 40-year-old Oxford don who later came up with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and the ensuing Christian allegory of Narnia.
The play, which I saw a decade ago in a passable off-Broadway production, poses little threat of rattling either believers or atheists, but tweaks at some big ideas in a palatable format. Conventional wisdom has it that stage plays must be opened up for the big screen. Germain and director/co-writer Matt Brown have done just that, unfortunately. The action spills out into time-jumping flashbacks intended to show how each man’s philosophy was a product of his biography: Lewis’s motherless adolescence, his atheism, experiences in the trenches of WWI and then re-embrace of Christianity, linked to his relationship with the mother (Orla Brady) of a dead fellow comrade.
On Freud’s side, there’s the deaths of a daughter and grandson, and the evils of war to prove the folly of belief in a benevolent god.
In addition to the flashbacks, the film has added a contemporary subplot concerns Freud’s close relationship (the word “attachment disorder” pops up) with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) who is, ahem, the only person allowed to touch Freud’s oral prosthesis. Anna, who later became a famous child analyst, is witnessed in various scenes travelling around London attempting to fill a subscription for her father’s morphine, and taking time declare her love to Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), her partner for the rest of her life. Inconsistently, Freud holds that “homosexuality is not immoral” except for lesbianism, which is pathological.
The best of the film takes place inside the Freud’s London study. There we first meet the 83-year-old doctor as he wakes from a dream in which he believes he is still back in Nazi-occupied Austria. He waits for his meeting with Lewis, aka “Jack,” who shows up late. The London trains are filled with people sending to their children to the countryside to avoid the blitz. Lewis is not entirely sure why he has been invited to see the famous doctor, but he believes it is because he mocked Freud in passing in his 1933 satirical allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress.
Freud denies it, but, in what was the last month of his life, feels the need to challenge Lewis’s belief in God. So, they sip whisky and debate, about the divinity of Christ, the meaning of suffering, sexuality and the after-life.
Freud is agitated and aggressive, occasionally being overcome with a painful spasm to take a morphine pill, and eye the suicide pill he keeps in a box. Lewis responds with the gentle confidence of one who have seen the light, occasionally probing at Freud’s weak spots, including that funny relationship with Anna. He also looks smug when Freud slips out: “Thank God.”
Performances are, predictably, strong with the 85-year-old Hopkins, bouncing about like a bantam-weight fighter, and Good, in the more restrained role, calmly watching the phenomenon as much as responding to it, eventually wearing down his opponent with compassion.
At one point, the doctor even allows Lewis to put his hands inside his mouth to adjust his prosthesis — if you wonder what Freud would make of that, by all means watch the film.
As an alternative, you might try the considerably less prestigious Netflix series, Freud, which The Guardian promises “recasts the legendary psychologist as a coked-up, seance-enthused witch hunter who uses hypnosis to solve crimes in 19th-century Vienna.” At least that sounds fun.
CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s interview with Freud’s Last Session director Matthew Brown and star Matthew Goode.
Freud’s Last Session. Directed by Matthew Brown. Written by Mathew Brown and Mark St. Germain, based on the play by Mark St. Germain. With Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Frieds, Jodi Balfour and Orla Brady.
Freud’s Last Session opens on Jan. 12 in Toronto (Scotiabank), Vancouver (Fifth Avenue, and Montreal, on Jan. 19 in Ottawa and throughout the winter in other cities.