Movie Review: Freud’s Last Session

Freud’s Last Session. Directed by Matt Brown. Written by Matt Brown and Mark St. Germain. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Jodi Balfour. Rated PG-13 for language, sexual material, bloody/violent flashbacks, smoking. Runtime 2 hr. 2 min. 

Freud’s Last Session is a fictional account: What if C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud met each other on the eve of World War II? This would be just weeks before Freud’s death, and after he was awarded the prestigious Goethe Prize for intellectual achievement. And this was before Lewis’ radio lectures on Christianity during the war, which became the basis for his famed apologetic work Mere Christianity. 

Those who are looking for a shootout between the atheist and the Christian will be disappointed. Freud (Anthony Hopkins) does most of the talking. Lewis (Matthew Goode) mostly listens. And thereby hangs an interpretation of the title. 

Freud unloads on Lewis tirades not just against Christianity, but often on his personal life. He strides around, gesturing with his arms, dogmatic and arrogant. Lewis listens cooly, sometimes sharing about his personal life when relevant, and giving mild rejoinders. In the third act, Freud occupies the famous couch in his office, while Lewis sits at the desk. Yes, this is Freud’s last session, with Freud as the patient. 

The movie is disjointed, with a rejoinder from either man sometimes much later than the question, and with vivid flashbacks interrupting seemingly at random. So the following is a stitching together of scenes that may not have been shown consecutively. 

Lewis shares that after his mother died, his father did not know how to deal with Lewis and his brother, so he sent them off to boarding school. Freud concludes that the distant father led Lewis to his superstitious longing for God. Lewis responds that actually, he reconciled with his father. He then points out that Freud hates his father, so perhaps that is why he rejects God. Freud dismisses that with a wave of his hand. 

Towards the start of the movie, Freud criticizes Lewis for being late, seeing that as a flaw. However, Lewis was late because of trains shipping children away from London to the safety of the countryside. The compassion shows plainly on Lewis’ face as he sees the children, and later when they both hear on the radio that twenty thousand are dead in Poland. Freud shows no such reaction. But Freud is concerned about those close to him—a daughter and grandson who died. He shows Lewis a photograph of them. Freud asks about their deaths and his own pain and suffering. Why does God allow it? And frankly, that is the question that most non-intellectuals feel is most important about God. 

At first Lewis says, “I don’t know,” and Freud thinks he has a victory. But then it becomes apparent that Lewis was talking about the particular suffering his family has gone through. Lewis goes on to say that if pleasure is God’s whisper, then pain is God’s megaphone. 

Freud constantly says Christianity is just superstition, an "insidious lie," and at the start he says he is surprised an intelligent man like Lewis believes in it. Later, we briefly see a flashback to Lewis’ writing group the Inklings, and we are shown an achingly short glimpse of a page of Tolkien’s work. Tolkien witnesses to the then-atheist Lewis, saying the Gospel is different from the world’s mythologies. He challenges Lewis to study this. We then see Lewis doing so, going back to the original Greek of the New Testament. 

Fans of both Freud and Lewis will be disappointed at some truncated versions of their arguments. Lewis says that all the religions that Freud denounces teach about doing what is right and not doing what is wrong. It leaves out Lewis’ argument that one can only know what is wrong from a sense of right, can only know what is bent from knowing what is straight, and that knowledge is what God puts in everyone. Freud gives a brief mention of his belief in the stages of sexual development, but it is so garbled by his oral cancer, it is hard to understand. 

Freud is portrayed as getting the better of Lewis over fear of death. During an air raid alarm that turns out to be false, they go to a church basement for shelter. Freud not only shows no gratitude, he is rude to the clergyman. But Lewis has a bad moment, which he says was a flashback to The Great War. Freud needles him about that moment, saying he showed no joy about meeting his God, and therefore Lewis had a lack of faith. Lewis looks stunned for seconds, and he has no reply. Later, on the train home, Lewis looks afraid again at distant lights that either remind him of war or show the preparations for war. 

Overall, Freud’s Last Session has an unsavory air. Freud’s daughter Anna, considered the founder of child psychoanalysis, is accused by more than one person of having attachment disorder towards her father. This is shown in a series of flashbacks that turn out to be beyond creepy. And the movie implies she had a lesbian relationship (which is shown briefly in a hallucination), for which there is no evidence and which Anna always denied. 

A lengthy flashback show the pact between Lewis and a friend during The Great War, which Lewis did write about. They both had single parents. If the friend were killed, Lewis was to take care of his mother for the rest of her life, and if Lewis were killed, the friend would take care of Lewis’ father for the rest of his life. The friend is killed. In the most horrific scene of the flashback, hunks of shrapnel are pulled out of Lewis’s leg without anesthetic. But when one puts together a few scenes in the movie, it clearly portrays Lewis as having a sexual relationship with his friend’s mother. There is no evidence for this.   

So because of these and other scenes, I cannot recommend Freud’s Last Session. Is this a biased review? Perhaps. But were we all meant to interpret the movie the same way? Unlikely.