Freud’s Final Session overview: Anthony Hopkins soars, philosophy flops

Few works of historic fiction have been so imaginative in premise, but so uninteresting and lackluster in execution. Freud’s Final Session places a powerhouse pair of actors, Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode, within the sneakers of two famend real-life figures, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, as they interact in theological debate. However the resultant dialog, primarily based on the play of the identical title by Mark St. Germain (who co-wrote the screenplay with director Matthew Brown), could be laughed out of a highschool philosophy membership. Regardless of the caliber of its performers — particularly Hopkins, who’s in probably the most fascinating section of his profession with works like The Father and One Life — Brown’s movie is an utter dud.

Disagreeable and unengaging proper out the gate, the film (just like the play, and the e book on which it’s primarily based) imagines a fictitious encounter between psychoanalytical large Freud (Hopkins) and creator and theologian Lewis (Goode), who would go on to put in writing The Chronicles of Narnia. Their dialog, courtesy of an invitation by Freud, unfolds on the day of Britain’s entry into World Struggle II, a background that must imbue their debate with a way of ominous urgency, however solely serves to create a short detour to a bomb shelter close to Freud’s London dwelling. Having left Nazi-controlled Austria, the curmudgeonly analyst lives together with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) — a professor herself — and concocts excuses to not spend time together with her girlfriend, Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour), although he received’t admit his discomfort with their relationship.

The movie initially has the makings of an intriguing drama, a couple of paradoxical determine whose controversial work many thought-about sexually revolutionary, however who can’t get previous his personal hang-ups. However the thought is relegated to a fleeting subplot at finest, informed by way of occasional flashbacks between Freud and Anna, who share little or no of the film’s 108-minute run time (trimmed from about two hours since its AFI Fest premiere). The thought of Freud reckoning together with his discomfort sometimes intrudes on his dialog with Lewis, however by no means absolutely takes form.

Their dialog, nonetheless, isn’t alluring sufficient to justify this omission, and it appears plagued from the beginning. Lewis has no thought why Freud may need invited him over (he takes a guess, but it surely’s incorrect) and Freud by no means reveals any concrete cause for eager to converse with the Oxford fellow past the imprecise notion of non secular inquiry. Lewis is Christian, whereas Freud is a Jewish atheist, however this alone is positioned because the mechanism driving each males to ask one another questions. Or quite, driving Freud to unpleasantly prod at Lewis’ religion, like a child who’s not too long ago found r/atheism.

Lewis hardly speaks or retorts at first, whereas Freud engages in what appears like the primary dialog round Christianity he’s ever had. He even verbalizes the millennia-old Epicurean trilemma (“If God is unable to stop evil, then he’s not omnipotent,” and many others.) as a method to reject the existence of a benevolent deity, although the movie’s theological inquiry is so woefully incomplete that it doesn’t even permit Lewis a touch of the retort to this for which he was identified (the apologetic trilemma). Regardless of the filmmakers’ views on faith, Freud’s Final Session affords its characters a woeful lack of perspective and conviction, and due to this fact any cause to be participating on this dialog within the first place.

Whereas the film has an intricate degree of design — Freud’s house is packed to the gills with books and trinkets that spur on quite a few conversational segues — that very same eye for element by no means applies to its mental curiosities. Hopkins and Goode are, due to this fact, saddled with largely empty materials, however they’re such seasoned performers that they make a meal out of it regardless, forcing that means and subtext the place none appear to exist on the web page, or within the filmmaking.

Goode, as an illustration, injects Lewis’ lack of conviction with a silently merciful streak, as if he have been refusing to interact out of pity for a bitter outdated trainer on the finish of his rope — though the textual content attributes this to him sussing out Freud’s impetus for debate. He might not have something attention-grabbing to say about Christian divinity, however he embodies it.

Photograph: Sony Footage Classics

Hopkins, in the meantime, is marvelous to look at in each second, between the sardonic laughter that accompanies Freud trailing off between ideas, the venomous supply of a few of his inquisitions, and the way in which every conversational transition is accompanied by temporary however recognizable beats on the professor’s face. His pregnant pauses flip plot factors into near-tangible ideas, virtually subtitled for our understanding, in a manner solely Hopkins can do. He’s all the time pondering, which makes him such a masterful actor.

The moments between the phrases are charming, however the phrases themselves are fluff, and the movie is generally phrases. Even when its visible method takes cues from each characters’ childhood recollections, these scenes find yourself visually uninteresting and conceptually literal. They’re by no means greater than picturizations of what’s being spoken at any second. Freud makes an attempt to delve into Lewis’ childhood and makes base observations, behind which there appears to lurk a extra advanced fact about his religion and his harrowing expertise in World Struggle I, but it surely’s a fact the movie doesn’t even broach as a query, not to mention a solution.

There’s no thriller to Freud’s Final Session, and no sense of visible dynamism to any scene. The colours are washed out, however by no means grim sufficient to evoke the oncoming horrors of World Struggle II (regardless of Freud foreshadowing them with a verbal anecdote about God’s absence in a previous tragedy), and the digicam and blocking seldom work to create a bodily relationship between Freud and Lewis, whether or not as adversaries chasing one another or reluctant mates rising nearer. There’s maybe one second of visible expression that doesn’t depend on banal dialogue — Lewis experiencing sudden shell shock, and Freud intuiting his previous on the battlefield within the course of — however this, too, finally ends up defined and re-explained in phrases.

Nothing actually comes of it. Nothing comes of something both man says. It’s all noise — all passionless anger entering into circles, captured by a digicam that appears averse to lingering on the super abilities of Hopkins and Goode, who strive their finest to rescue Freud’s Final Session from itself. Alas, their makes an attempt are in useless, since Lewis finally ends up with nothing resembling an actual outlook or perspective, and within the course of, Freud finally ends up arguing with himself. The closing titles point out that, within the days main as much as World Struggle II, Freud did the truth is meet with an Oxford don, whose identification is unknown. It’s simply as effectively; the movie may have named Goode’s character John Doe and little would’ve modified.

Freud’s Final Session opens in restricted theaters on Dec. 22.