‘Freud’s Last Session’ Review: Anthony Hopkins Slips Easily Into Sigmund’s Skin in Talky Two-Hander
28.10.2023 - 17:11
/ variety.com
Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it’s a loaded symbol in an imagined conversation between world-famous “sex doc” Sigmund Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins, in irritable curmudgeon mode) and converted atheist C.S.
Lewis (Matthew Goode, looking slightly worse for wear). In the stage play turned only-slightly-less-stagey film, “Freud’s Last Session,” these two titans of 20th century thought meet at the psychoanalyst’s London home in early September 1939 to discuss God, father figures (both spiritual and biological) and, of course, sex.
Freud famously had a way of making everything about sex, and once he lights his cigar — a prop which Freud treats every bit as portentously as one might Chekhov’s proverbial gun — the subject effectively chases out their more gripping disagreement over faith. Expanding only slightly upon the stuffiness of his tweedy 2015 biopic, “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” director Matthew Brown has taken the play by Mark St.
Germain and whittled away a bit of the talk (thereby making room for formative memories from their respective childhoods). Trouble is, where a fictional tête-à-tête between Freud and Lewis is concerned, sparkling talk is precisely what audiences have paid to experience.
In “The Two Popes” — another Hopkins two-hander — the ping-ponging of Big Ideas proved perfectly electrifying, whereas here, Freud’s on offense for most of the movie, while Lewis is too polite to take the bait. As a result, this feels less like a racket sport than juggling, as Brown introduces flashbacks and other distractions (including a few impressive trench-warfare scenes from Lewis’ military service), repeatedly cutting away to whatever Freud’s daughter Anna might be
.