“Freud’s last session” starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, adds to a string of superb end-of-chapter performances from the 86-year-old actor. It was the soul of “Armageddon Time”, the reason to see “The father” and Jonathan Pryce's papal foil to Pope Francis in “The two popes”. With the exception of James Gray's more cinematic “Armageddon Time,” the films offered simple, stagey showcases for Hopkins, a lion in winter.
“Freud’s Last Session,” which opens in theaters this weekend, also comes from the stage and, like “The Two Popes,” focuses on the tête-à-tête of intellectual opposites. Mark St. Germain's 2009 two-character play brought together Freud and CS Lewis (played by Matthew Goode in the film) for a speculative meeting between the two in 1939 London.
An old Freud, suffering from oral cancer, prepares to receive the Oxford academic in his London home as war with Germany becomes inevitable. The factual starting point is that Freud, three weeks before his death, allegedly met an anonymous Oxford don. As Freud's daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) prepares to leave in the morning, he mentions Lewis's imminent arrival. “The Christian apologist? she answers. “Yeah,” he laughed.
Their conversation, which constitutes the bulk of the film, imagines a spiritual debate between the father of psychoanalysis, a proud atheist and man of science, and the theological Lewis, a believer who, in the years following “Freud's Last Session “, is said to have written his Christian apologetic novel “The Screw Letters” and, later, the fantastic parables of the “Chronicles of Narnia”.
If their opposing positions haven't created enough drama, air raid sirens sound (Hitler has just taken Poland) and Freud's health is bad enough that he, between two drops of morphine in his whiskey , looks at a suicide pill several times during the day. . Death and history stamp their discourse on God, fear and pain.
But the elements are never quite coherent in “Freud’s Last Session”. The pace of the conversation seems choppy and lacks the in-depth exchanges that can electrify a two-player. Freud — or Hopkins? – therefore dominates their speech. Goode, with less to chew on, remains more observational and distant so that his Lewis still fully engages Freud.
Director Matthew Brown, who shares screenwriting credit with St. Germain, artificially “opened up” the play to include flashbacks and subplots, notably that of Anna, whose extreme devotion to her father takes into account Freud's discussions of sexuality. Yet Anna's story, including her relationship with a woman, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), unrecognized by her father, is too complex to be inserted into the theological debate. It feels like a movie in its own right. The fact that “Freud’s Last Session” is too dark in shadows also contributes to the film’s lack of clarity.
But Freud and Lewis's dialogue sometimes finds compelling commonalities. Fantasy occupies an important place in both minds: Freud in his analysis of dreams and Lewis in the dream worlds he will create. And both acquired their beliefs in part from childhood experiences that color their lives. “I have only two words to offer humanity: grow,” Freud said.
And Hopkins remains fascinating. Some three decades after playing Lewis himself in 1993's “Shadowlands,” he now stars opposite the novelist, adding to the film's poignancy.
But I suspect my memory will bleed from some of these later Hopkins films. In each of them he grapples with a life of fulfillment just as he presents pains and joys. He might be picking an azalea in “Freud's Last Session” or watching his grandson pilot a model rocket in “Armageddon Time.” But each performance crackles with wit, wisdom and playfulness in the face of the inevitable. They add to a melancholic cycle of films of big questions and small moments.
“Freud's Last Session,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for thematic material, some bloody/violent images, sexual material and smoking. Duration: 108 minutes. Two stars out of four.