Freud's Last Session: the trailer and first reviews are here!
Freud's Last Session: the trailer and first reviews are here!
The film imagines a meeting of minds between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.
Thirty years ago, Anthony Hopkins played C.S. Lewis in a movie called Shadowlands. In one early scene in that film, a colleague of Lewis’s teases him with the idea that there’s some sort of sexual subtext to the Narnia stories, and Hopkins-as-Lewis dismisses the idea as a bit of “hand-me-down Freudianism”.
Now, this year, Hopkins is playing Sigmund Freud himself… and he’s doing so in a movie about a fictitious meeting between Freud and C.S. Lewis.
The new film, which co-stars Matthew Goode as Lewis, is called Freud’s Last Session, and last week it had its world premiere at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles. Along the way, the distributor released a trailer for the film, the director started giving interviews about the film, and critics began to review the film. So let’s round ’em all up!
First, the trailer, which you can watch here:
There’s not a whole lot to comment on there—it is a teaser, after all—but for what it’s worth, the bit at the end, where Freud says “we’re all cowards before death,” reminds me of how Lewis began A Grief Observed, a sort of diary he kept after the death of his wife in 1960, by saying, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
Next, the coverage.
Vanity Fair ran a “first look” article that included an interview with the film’s director, Matthew Brown; his credits include The Man Who Knew Infinity. A few excerpts:
Director Matthew Brown spoke with Hopkins for almost a year before filming Freud’s Last Session, gearing up for the stimulating and challenging project. “Hopkins is looking back on things, and he was drawing from a lifetime of experience for this role,” Brown says in his first interview about the movie. “We went back and forth about his seeing this in more personal terms…. It was more of a larger encompassing personal journey that was remarkable to watch.” . . .
The whirlwind week marks the climax of a fairly long development process for the director, who received the script seven years ago. He reluctantly signed on. For one thing, Last Session felt too similar to his previous feature, 2016’s The Man Who Knew Infinity—another exchange of ideas between two great actors, in its case Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. For another, Brown grew up with a father who practiced as a psychiatrist. “I was like, I don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” Brown says. “But there was something about it—probably Freudian—that I couldn’t let go.” . . .
The crux of the discussion, indeed, is Freud’s contemplation of mortality. “He’s looking at his life, and he’s gasping those last breaths—but Freud was intellectually curious, always second-guessing, always questioning his own theories,” Brown says. “I think if he was alive today, he would just pick up where he left off and say, ‘All those ideas were wrong that I came up with, and now I’m onto new ideas.’ He comes into this being open to whatever Lewis presents.” This doesn’t necessarily make for neat agreement, and it’s in that enduring, almost painful tension that Freud’s Last Session finds its dramatic power. Lewis’s faith pushes up against Freud’s logic; crumbling romantic and familial relationships go under the microscope. “You have the arc of the intellectual ideas, but then you also have the arc of the human emotional ideas,” Brown says. “Both characters wind up in their own therapy sessions, and by the end, they’re both having to confront their own demons.”
And now, a few bits from the reviews.
Stephen Farber at The Hollywood Reporter:
Bigger and longer are not always better. Case in point: Freud’s Last Session, the lavish film based on a modest off-Broadway play that captivated theater audiences a decade ago. Playwright Mark St. Germain worked with director Matthew Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity) to reshape his two-character drama about an imaginary conversation between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis as they debate the existence of God. That provocative exchange is still in the movie, and it sometimes crackles, thanks to the performances of Matthew Goode as Lewis and, especially, Anthony Hopkins as Freud. But the heart of the story is constantly undermined by a surfeit of asides about Lewis’ experiences in the First World War, Freud’s highly charged relationship with his daughter Anna, and several other subplots. . . .
It is understandable that Brown wanted to move the action outside Freud’s study, and a scene in which an air raid drives Freud and Lewis, along with many other Londoners, to take refuge in a church (suitably ironic) is a valuable addition to the story. Less valuable are a rash of flashbacks. Some show Freud as a child with his weak-willed father. Many others show Lewis’ convoluted history, beginning with the death of his mother when he was a child, going on to his travails during World War I and a bizarre interlude involving his romance with the mother (Orla Brady) of a comrade who was killed in battle.
There are also scenes portraying Lewis’ friendship with Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien (Stephen Campbell Moore).1 A few of these sequences would perhaps be interesting in a biographical film about Lewis, but they seem rushed and perfunctory here and have very little bearing on the philosophical dialogue between Lewis and Freud that is the heart of the story.
Peter Debruge at Variety:
Expanding only slightly upon the stuffiness of his tweedy 2015 biopic, “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” director Matthew Brown has taken the play by Mark St. Germain and whittled away a bit of the talk (thereby making room for formative memories from their respective childhoods). Trouble is, where a fictional tête-à-tête between Freud and Lewis is concerned, sparkling talk is precisely what audiences have paid to experience.
In “The Two Popes” — another Hopkins two-hander — the ping-ponging of Big Ideas proved perfectly electrifying, whereas here, Freud’s on offense for most of the movie, while Lewis is too polite to take the bait. As a result, this feels less like a racket sport than juggling, as Brown introduces flashbacks and other distractions (including a few impressive trench-warfare scenes from Lewis’ military service), repeatedly cutting away to whatever Freud’s daughter Anna might be doing at just the moment he’s established some momentum between these two minds. . . .
So many movies are either mindless or completely disinterested with engaging the intellect of their audiences that “Freud’s Last Session” offers a welcome bit of brain stimulation — but does far less for the soul.
Tim Grierson at Screen Daily:
How best to navigate life: through reason or faith? Freud’s Last Session features two worthy combatants facing off on the issue in 1939 but, despite its thoughtful ruminations and supple performances, this period drama fails to produce the expected intellectual fireworks. Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode are commendable in their roles as, respectively, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and author C.S. Lewis, their imagined debate over the existence of God juxtaposed with Germany’s invasion of Poland and Britain’s declaration of war. Unfortunately, the tasteful approach ends up being a hindrance: director and co-writer Matthew Brown allows the story to be so stately and reserved that the two men’s passion for their competing worldviews doesn’t fully register. . . .
A smattering of flashbacks triggered by Freud and Lewis’ conversation help open up the story beyond the doctor’s cosy cottage, but these key glimpses inside their lives are not especially revealing. Likewise, for as much as the two men talk, the dialogue rarely crackles, which is surprising as they are arguing about one of humanity’s core questions. Hopkins’ playful surliness and Goode’s debonair wit make for some fun sparring, but anyone invested in the issues Freud’s Last Session purports to explore will come away disappointed, and the characters rarely draw blood.
There are more reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, where the film currently has a 67% score based on six reviews. I can’t find a page for the film at Metacritic right now.
The film opens in New York and Los Angeles December 22, and will roll out to other theatres from there. (It’s coming to my own neck of the woods January 12.)
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Related links (copied from my previous Substack post on this film):
In the early days of my first blog—between 2005 and 2008—I kept a detailed list of my writings about the “Inklings” (i.e. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friends) and the movies that had been based on their books.
This included links to my reviews of the 1979 and 1988 versions of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the 2005 version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the 2008 version of Prince Caspian (and may I say, it’s weird to see Ben Barnes as Caspian now after seeing him play so many villains and bad boys in shows like Westworld, The Punisher, and Shadow & Bone).
My review of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis (2021).
This doesn’t really have anything to do with Lewis, but it’s kind of Lewis-adjacent, or Hopkins-as-Lewis-adjacent: in 1999, I got to interview Sir Richard Attenborough, who directed Hopkins as Lewis in Shadowlands. We mostly spoke about Attenborough’s then-new film Grey Owl, though.
My review of The Two Popes (2019), which also doesn’t really have anything to do with Lewis, but it’s another film based on a play about religion-themed conversations between two famous people, one of whom is played by Hopkins, so… it’s kind of in the same ballpark as Freud’s Last Session, maybe…?
I get a kick out of the fact that Goode and Moore play the oft-paired Lewis and Tolkien, as both actors had small parts in the first Downton Abbey movie four years ago—though I don’t believe they shared any scenes in that film. (Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, also had a small part in Shadowlands, for whatever that’s worth. It all connects.)