Freud's Last Session

It's 1939 on the very eve of declaration of War in London. Oxford don C. S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) calls upon Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) at his invitation. He passes Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries) as she goes out to lecture and ponder whether she will reveal her lesbian affair to her father. Meanwhile, the two men attack each other's philosophical beliefs.

And that's what the movie is, two men talking, interrupted occasionally by flashbacks to their younger days and air raid to lend this stage play some cinematic credibility. In this made-up scenario -- although the story is that an Oxford don visited Freud shortly before his death, the claim, as here, that it was Lewis, is a fabrication of the play and movie -- they argue around each other, and finally agree only that people are afraid of death.

The rest of it.... well, Freud's beliefs are at the end of his life (he died three weeks after the supposed events of this film), while there are plenty of things that Lewis did say until twenty years after. As for the basic disagreement about religion versus science, that's a non-conflict; as smarter people than I have declared, science is about how, not why. If G*d created the universe we live in, thanks a lot.

Both men are fine actors and easily translate the script into natural-sounding words. I have no idea if Hopkins' accent is a good representation of the Viennese one; Kohli Calhoun is listed as the dialect coach.

Anyone interested in the works of Freud and Lewis, or theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis will likely find this interesting. Having no grounding in the work of one of both could be a barrier. Freud's health issues and the evil of war add a floor for the good vs. Bad, lovintheological arguments Echoing others, not a stellar script, but solid performances like Hopkins make it quite watchable. Anna's character's and the war's beginning add some plot points, but work fine as a ways to break up the dialogue and aid the flow. While I do not profess to be an intellectual, it's nerdy enough to be thought provoking, which may be it's best feature.

I respect S Freud as an early but pioneering psychologist, and I very much admire C. S. Lewis as a humanist and fiction writer. Whether this meeting between Freud and Lewis really happened doesn't matter so much, I think. What matters is that it's a fascinating concept to imagine the two men debating science vs religion, and this film does a very decent job of portraying this discussion.

While I wouldn't go so far as to call this the most moving film I've ever seen - I think Shadowlands for example was far more moving and The Soul Keeper ( a film about Jung and his female patient ) was more intriguing - I did genuinely find Freud's Last Session to be philosophically poignant. The discussions between Freud and Lewis are intellectually sound and do ask those age old questions, such as if God is good, why is there suffering? A question I guess we all grapple with in one way or another.

This film did remind me a bit of In Lambeth the other play about a fictional meeting between Thomas Paine and William Blake which, while quite different, approached the two sides of a philosophical debate in a similarly genuine and interesting manner.

Ultimately, there is quite a good amount of wisdom and intellectual content in Freud's Last Session and for that I found it fun, mildly moving and worthwhile. The cinematography and acting are decent. If you like psychology, philosophy and films that are really just play's on screen, then I hope you'll enjoy this.

As a fan of Lewis' work (though far from being an expert on the guy) I was very interested in seeing this film. Even though the target audience is probably 30 years my senior, I still enjoyed it quite a bit. Hopkins's and Goode's performances really carry the film. Normally, I struggle with movies that use a lot of flashbacks to tell the story but it was done here in such a way as was helpful and not distracting or disorienting.

I do wish the script had been a bit stronger. There were a couple scenes that seemed to fizzle out rather than having a much needed emphatic response, mostly on Lewis's end.

Overall I liked the film and would see it again.

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.