Freud's Last Session

Father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (Hopkins) and British author C.S. Lewis (Goode) debate Life’s Big Questions one rainy afternoon in pre-Blitz London in the talky Freud’s Last Session. The 1939 setting for this heady dialogue about sex, mortality, and the existence of God, among other things, is ominous: Hitler has invaded Poland just two days before, and a new world war has begun in a Europe still in shellshock from the War to End All Wars. Anti-aircraft barrage balloons hover above the emptying English capital, while air raid sirens urge harried civilians to seek shelter in makeshift bomb shelters. The center is starting to no longer hold.

So why does this adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s award-winning Off-Broadway stage drama of the same name largely feel inconsequential, despite the external turmoil beginning to swirl when this fictionalized meeting takes place in Freud’s Hampstead home? (The film’s coda hints of the possibility of an actual encounter between the two men around this time, based on a reference to an unnamed Oxford don in an appointment book.) The atheist Freud, perhaps the era’s most modern thinker, and former skeptic turned Christian apologist Lewis, chat and chat and chat for almost two hours until they reach an impasse of begrudging acceptance. But dramatically speaking, their exchange is less an intellectual game of one-upmanship and more an obligatory checklist of each other’s ideologies and beliefs, with particular nudge-nudge emphasis on the Viennese doctor’s more prurient theories about castration anxiety, the origins of homosexuality, and the Oedipal and Electra complexes. Except for a potent scene in which Freud rages against Christianity’s conceptual embrace of “God’s plan” to explain why a supreme being would allow terrible things to happen, it’s a relatively bloodless tit-for-tat conversation that shoots sparks that rarely catch fire.

Generally, opening up a two-character play confined to a single space is a reasonable approach to transform source material into something more cinematic. But director Brown’s incorporation of flashbacks and parallel narratives involving third characters (for example, Freud’s too-devoted daughter Anna, played by Fries, who’s secretly a lesbian) to give the movie a little breathing room dilutes the dramatic tension between the two principals in their duel with words. More pointedly, the strategy also commits the sin of confusing the narrative. There are times that you’re puzzled, at least initially, about when and where the shifting action being depicted onscreen is occurring, even if introductory verbal cues are provided. (Some of cinematographer Ben Smithard’s lighting choices don’t help matters.) Perhaps that’s why the commanding Hopkins – vibrant as ever here – employs certain vocal tricks like self-referential chuckles or (dis)approving grunts, as a way to distract from the film’s inherently unsteady structure and tone. Or maybe not. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.