Most of this film takes place at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, where Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna took residence in June 1938 after escaping from Nazi-occupied Vienna. In his ‘den’ filled with his library of books and religious objects, Freud lives in what he regards as an echo of his former home.
Taking place in early September 1939, just days before his assisted suicide, he is visited by C.S. Lewis, a fellow and tutor in English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. As the father of psychoanalysis, Freud, is not impressed by Lewis’s firm belief in Christianity.
Today Lewis is best remembered for his seven-volume ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, that have his children protagonists fighting evil in the fantasy world of Narnia. Much of his literary output promoted Christian ideals, even though they did include pagan imagery and magic.
Freud’s Last Session stages this imaginary meeting of minds as a metaphorical tennis match, where they trade shots at each other. Sometimes they are subtle low swings of humour, others directly attack their opponent.
Neither are going to give up their viewpoint on the nature of human existence and the role of evil. Lewis, having served in WWI, knows from personal experience the horrors of modern-day warfare, and Freud’s wireless, broadcasts constant reminders that war with Germany has come to Britain. Freud is also attacked by his own war with terminal cancer.
Lewis believes in God who gives purpose to our existence, whereas Freud believes our own internal forces shape our destiny and wider human civilisation; for him there is no saviour and religion is a childish escape from reality. In our own troubling times such arguments are still very valid, and like this film shows, there is no ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything.
Anthony Hopkins plays a grumpy yet still sharp-minded Freud, in opposition to what he would call the repressed and diffident Lewis who is played by Matthew Goode. There are flashbacks to important events that shaped their characters, and there is a side-story about Anna Freud, played by Liv Lisa Fries. Anna, although a psychoanalyst in her own right, is chained to making her father her first priority and fearful about revealing her lesbian relationship with Dorothy Burlingham, played by Jodi Balfour.
The screenplay was co-authored by Mark St. Germain based on his play of the same name, with the film’s director Matthew Brown. The play was based on the book ‘The Question of God’ (2002) by clinical psychiatrist Armand Nicholi. Even though the film goes beyond Maresfield Gardens, it does feel very much like a play dominated by Anthony Hopkins, which is no bad thing.
Freud’s Last Session is screening at Plymouth Arts Cinema from Saturday 22 – Thursday 27 June.
Reviewed by Nigel Watson
