Shortly before his death in 1939, Dr. Sigmund Freud reportedly met with a young Oxford professor at his home in London. C.S. Lewis, the lay theologian who would go on to write “The Chronicles of Narnia,” was at Oxford during that time. What if he was the young professor that Freud met with? What if right before his death, Freud and Lewis – two men who fundamentally, vehemently disagreed with each other on just about everything – had a day-long, philosophical discussion about religion and the existence of God on the eve of World War II?
This scenario fuels the plot of “Freud’s Last Session,” Matthew Brown’s filmic adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s play of the same name. Historical fiction, or perhaps more accurately in this case, historical imagination, can be a ripe tool for storytelling. In 2020, Regina King’s adaptation of Kemp Powers’s play “One Night in Miami…” imagined what might have been said between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown, and a young Cassius Clay on the night of Feb. 25, 1964 – a night when we know the four men were really together, but not what occurred.
But unlike “One Night in Miami…,” “Freud’s Last Session” feels fundamentally bound by its playlike structure, and the attempts to make it cinematic are riddled with visual and storytelling cliches. As Lewis and Freud respectively, Matthew Goode and Anthony Hopkins deliver fine performances, but the meat of their conversation feels simplistic, beneath both of their intellects. The film’s attempts to connect the broader conversation about God to the men’s personal lives – particularly Freud’s fraught relationship with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) – are thin at best, scattered to the wind at worst.
The screenplay, written by St. Germain and Brown, imagines the impetus for the meeting between the two men to be “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” Lewis’s work of allegorical fiction that satirizes Freud and his beliefs. Freud insists he has not read the book, but invites Lewis over for a chat, fascinated by a man he considers intelligent, yet still believes in the grand illusion of God.
It’s not difficult to tell when a film is based on a play. The action is often physically contained and dialogue heavy, and “Freud’s Last Session” is no exception. But each attempt to adapt the story cinematically fails to capture the imagination in the way that these two men – whether you agreed with them or not – absolutely did. Brown relies mainly on flashbacks to get out of Freud’s office. But the flashbacks inadvertently break up the momentum of rapport that has built up between Goode and Hopkins at any given moment.
The conversations unfolding between Freud and Lewis aren’t half as compelling as the chemistry between Goode and Hopkins, particularly in their smaller moments together. The actual religious argument doesn’t bring much new to the table, but the in between moments do. Lewis bent over at the waist scurrying along behind Freud and trying to tie an apron around the older man who won’t stand still, or Freud allowing Lewis to touch the prosthetic in his mouth (Freud was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923), one that he previously wouldn’t even let his doctors touch – these moments give away more about the connection between these two men than their beliefs about God. Both Freud and Lewis make the point that people often give away more with what they don’t say than what they do, and these moments are the best examples of that.
But letting a story live in the unspoken doesn’t necessarily work if you can’t build a connection between the silences. Freud and Lewis both try to corner the other on complicated aspects of their personal lives, but the connective tissue between their personal lives and the larger religious arguments is slight at best. This failing is most apparent as the movie explores the relationship between Freud and his daughter Anna.
Anna Freud was a successful psychoanalyst in her own right, and the film takes on the subject of her sexuality and how her relationship with her father toed the line of daughter and patient. At one point, she became her father’s patient, attending nightly sessions with him where she would discuss her sexual fantasies and dreams. Freud’s ideas about lesbianism specifically were regressive at best, and – at least in the film – the analysis appears to be some sort of attempt at conversion therapy.
After the analysis ended, Anna formed a life-long partnership with a woman named Dorothy Burlingham. Yet, all through her life she would deny the claim that their relationship was sexual, and she did a healthy amount of work in the area of conversion therapy herself. Anna Freud would make a fascinating character study, but in typical Freudian fashion, she’s boiled down to her connection with her father.
Anna is constantly fretting about her father and his cancer, literally prepared to lay down her life for him and his work if necessary, pushing all other relationships and obligations to the wayside. Her relationship to him is the most interesting aspect of the film, but “Freud’s Last Session” is as blind to the exploration of that relationship as Freud himself. Anna’s sexuality is boiled down to a hallucination her father has of her in bed with Dorothy and a flashback to a session she had with her father where her attachment hits a boiling point. She ends up in a seemingly happier place at the end of the film, but we have no concept of how she arrived there. Over the course of the film, her journey is particularly one note, and that’s really the issue with all of ‘Freud’s Last Session” – there’s never a breakthrough.
