I saw this movie this afternoon - Saturday afternoon - and there were only three people in the hall. I was not surprised.
Freud's Last Session is part of a cottage movie genre, almost always taken from a Broadway play, where two-man shows are relatively common. The author puts two historical figures together in a room and lets them debate various important issues for close to two hours. Nixon/Frost is the one I remember offhand, but there have been others as well. In the theater - a small theater - I can see this working well. I'm not sure how it works as a movie, or more to the point: for whom it works. Movies, even modest ones like this, cost a LOT more to produce than plays. Can something like this recoup the investment?
Yes, the two actors give very fine performances. People go to see Shakespeare plays not to see what will happen to Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. They already know before they enter the theater. They go to see how the actors will deliver the lines.
But here, unlike in Shakespeare, the lines are not particularly striking. Hopkins in particular did a great job of creating the character Freud, but he didn't have Shakespeare's words - or even, say, those of the playwright who wrote The Lion in Winter - to work with.
So I'm left with my initial question: how many people are going to pay to see Hopkins and Goode deliver their uninspired lines? And will that make enough ticket sales to at least break even on this movie?
I enjoyed it, yes, but I found that it was too much of the same thing for too long, and would have been happier if it had been shorter.
