Anthony Hopkins shines in ‘Freud’s Last Session’

Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis and Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud in a scene from “Freud’s Last Session” (Sony Pictures Classics)

Freud’s Last Session,” starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, adds to a string of sterling late-chapter performances by the 86-year-old actor. He was the soul of “Armageddon Time,” the reason to see “The Father” and the papal foil to Jonathan Pryce’s Pope Francis in “The Two Popes.”

“Freud’s Last Session,” which expands in theaters this weekend, also comes from the stage and, like “The Two Popes,” centers on the tete-a-tete of intellectual opposites. Mark St. Germain’s 2009 two-character play brought together Freud and C.S. Lewis (played by Matthew Goode in the film) for a speculative meeting between the two in 1939 London.

An aged Freud, suffering from oral cancer, prepares to receive the Oxford academic at his London home while war with Germany is growing inevitable. The factual jumping off point is that Freud, three weeks before his death, is recorded as meeting with an unnamed Oxford don. As Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) prepares to leave in the morning, he mentions Lewis’ impending arrival. “The Christian apologist?” she responds. “Yah,” he chuckles.

Their conversation, which makes up 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 after “Freud’s Last Session” takes place would pen his Christian apologetic novel “The Screwtape Letters” and, later, the fantasy parables of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

If their adverse positions didn’t make for enough drama, air raid sirens are sounding (Hitler has just taken Poland) and Freud’s health is bad enough that he, in between dripping morphine into his whiskey, several times eyes a suicide pill during the day. Death and history buffer their talk of God, fear and pain.

But the elements never quite cohere in “Freud’s Last Session.” The rhythm of conversation feels choppy and lacks the probing give and take that can electrify a two-hander. Freud — or it it Hopkins? — so dominates their talk. Goode, with less to chew on, remains more observational and removed for his Lewis to ever fully engage Freud.

Anna’s story, including a relationship with a woman, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), not acknowledged by her father, is too complex to graft into the theological debate. It feels like a movie in its own right. That “Freud’s Last Session” is overly murky in shadows also contributes to the movie’s lack of clarity.

But Freud and Lewis’ dialogue sometimes finds compelling points of commonality. Fantasy figures prominently into both minds — Freud in his analysis of dreams and Lewis in the dreamworlds he’ll create. And both come to their beliefs in part from childhood experiences that color their lives. “I have only two words to offer humanity: Grow up,” says Freud.

And Hopkins remains riveting. JAKE COYLE, Film Writer,  MDT/AP 

“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. Running time: 108 minutes. ★★★★