Film Review: Freud's Last Session

I must admit that it would never have occurred to me to sit down for a film called “Freud’s Last Session” if I hadn’t been invited to see it as a member of the reviewing press.

After all, Freud is kind of outdated these days, isn’t he? After all, this father of modern psychoanalysis, who died way back on the eve of World War II in 1939, was a morphine user. What could he have to tell us today?

Well, in the new film “Freud’s Last Session,” C.S. Lewis, the famous author who wrote “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” as well as books about divorce, grief and pain, did come to visit Freud. 

We don’t really know why (or even whether he did), but in “Freud’s Last Session” we’ll get to observe them discussing religion, grief, pain, war and all sorts of things.

Freud was a known religious skeptic about religion (non-believer is probably a better word). Lewis was a believer, even an Anglican lay theologian. Did Lewis think he could convert the old skeptic?

You’ll have 75 minutes to observe these two discussing the existence of God along with more normal topics like Freud’s relationship with his lesbian daughter Anna and his more unconventional relationship with his best friend’s mother.

Anthony Hopkins is terrific as Freud, the grumpy old geezer who knows what he believes and is even more convinced about what he does not believe. “I have only two words to offer humanity,” he says. “Grow up.”

Freud says it another way: “Truth is in what you don’t say.”

Matthew Goode plays Lewis with the conviction (and the impatience) of a believer.

So in the end, we have a film based on a play based on a book (Armand Nicholi’s “The Question of God.)” And several fine actors (including the women) to portray them.

I admit that I walked out a bit exhausted.