BY ROGER WATSON
Scrolling through the menu of films on the BA flight from London to Hong Kong recently, I came across Freud’s Last Session. I would not have been interested had it not been for the face of Britain’s national treasure and veteran actor Anthony Hopkins below the title.
The premise of the film is that, in his final days while dying of cigar-induced mouth cancer, Sigmund Freud was visited by a young C.S. Lewis. Spoiler alert: this visit almost certainly never took place, although, before the final credits, one of those scrolling “and, in fact…” messages claims that before his death, Freud was visited by a young Oxford don. Maybe so, but I think that if C.S. Lewis had actually met Sigmund Freud, we’d know about it—unless Lewis was embarrassed by his performance, as well he should have been, based on this film.
The “plot,” such as it is, revolves around a conversation about the existence of God. Freud, father of the controversial field of psychoanalysis, is an ardent non-believer. At the time, Lewis was in the early stages of his conversion to Christianity. The rest is, sadly, nonsense.
If Frank Warren had promoted this “fight,” he would have chosen a better opponent for Freud. Clearly, Freud had a mind like Jupiter, was widely read, and had another advantage over Lewis: he had lived a long life. I have always found Lewis’s anodyne and lighthearted take on Christianity unconvincing. That, coupled with the fact that he never submitted himself to the discipline of organized religion, has perhaps made me take him less seriously than many others do.
When fighters are unevenly matched, the outcome is inevitable. Indeed, Freud has Lewis on the ropes from the start. Lewis, played by Matthew Goode, comes across as somewhat overawed, uncertain, and verging on incoherence in his responses to Freud.
Bearing in mind that the conversation never took place, Freud rolls out all the old tropes about belief in God: “If God exists, then why does He allow X, Y, or Z?” He concludes with what he sees as the injustice of his young grandson’s death. Lewis, in response, merely raises his eyebrows and struggles to reply with anything approaching the quick wit, eloquence, or repartee Freud delivers.
The film clearly sets out to ridicule belief in God, which is hardly surprising. This message is conveyed near the start of the film when an air raid siren sounds, and Freud and Lewis must take shelter in a church crypt. Freud, ever-phlegmatic and quipping, is contrasted by the quivering, tearful wreck that is Lewis.
The message is hardly subtle and reminded me of a scene in Richard Attenborough’s execrable Gandhi film. Gandhi is befriended by a Presbyterian clergyman (probably fictional), and they encounter a rampaging mob while out walking. Gandhi keeps his cool, while the minister is terrified. Gandhi questions him about his fear, given that he believes in God. The minister’s reply is unconvincing—apostatic, in fact.
The atheistic bias is spread thickly here: as they emerge from the crypt into the church, Lewis encounters a priest examining the statue of a saint. When he asks who the statue depicts, the priest gives the wrong answer, and—predictably—Freud steps in to correctly identify the saint. Message: atheists do their homework and often know more about religion than believers.
From there, the film meanders, taking many a long and winding road away from the main storyline to explore the life of Freud’s daughter, Emma. As portrayed, she is a truly irritating character whose life revolves around her father, especially in her efforts to procure the morphine to which he is clearly addicted.
Anthony Hopkins, an actor I generally admire, has sustained a long and distinguished career largely by playing Anthony Hopkins. Even in this respect, however, we are shortchanged here; due to the frequent digressions from the main characters, we see pitifully little of him. The same goes for Goode, except that we’re treated to the occasional flashback—“flash” being too energetic a word for this film—of his younger days: a blurry woodland with a deer in it, for some reason, and one scene of him in the pub with Tolkien and other Oxford dons.
The outcome of the film is, inevitably, a technical knockout for Freud. Lewis slinks off, defeated, into a rainy night. This wasn’t the only film starring Anthony Hopkins on the BA flight, and I’m aware of several others he has made recently. It’s hard to know what keeps him going, but even he must hope that Freud’s Last Session isn’t his final cinematic outing. While the film filled some time on my 13-hour flight, had I gone to the cinema or watched it at home, I might have concluded that I had just used up another precious 90 minutes of my life.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.