THE GREAT DEBATE

HOPKINS BECOMES THE GREAT THINKER

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Sigmund Freud senses the end of his life approaching as London prepares for war against Germany during September 1939.

Within this context of violence and human suffering, Anthony Hopkins performs the father of psychoanalyses in the ultimate discussion about life with Christian author CS Lewis.

Lewis accepts Freud’s invitation to his London home where he meets Freud’s daughter, Anna, and all his collectables brought from Austria after fleeing German Nazi persecution.

Director Matt Brown has the two big thinkers on opposite sides of the debate gradually get acquainted, and the more comfort develops between the two characters the deeper the discussion gets.

Matthew Good plays Professor CS Lewis in all transparency since Freud can see the truth in anyone. Good shows Lewis as respectful and as cautious as one can be with Freud leading the discussion.

The plot revolves around Freud’s London study where he conducts sessions in his groundbreaking therapy using psychoanalyses.

Brown spins the plot off into little vignettes of memory, as one might expect when entangled in a deep discussion with Freud. One short scene sequence explains why Freud and his daughter Anna moved from Vienna. Another short scene sequence shows Freud as a child going for a walk through the forest with his father.

The camera shows what’s going on inside the great minds by panning across the little details in the room and by occasionally creating imperfect mirror images of the outside of the characters.

The 1 h 48 m runtime is enough time for the discussion. And Lewis, in the end, has enough time to catch the train back to Oxford.

Liv Lisa Fries plays Anna Freud, a well-educated lecturer in her own right who remains devoted to her father while also enjoying her own independence. Anna provides an extra dynamic in the narrative, but everything seems a bit fleeting as the narrative moves very quickly even inside Freud’s London study.

Brown could have balanced everything out a bit more by extending the scene sequences away from the main narrative. The trip to the bomb shelter was interesting with the two great thinkers having to hunker down with the rest of the neighborhood in the church basement.

Hidden memories pop up and deconstruct the here and now worlds of the characters only ever so temporarily while too many more of these momentary fissures would have been too distracting.

Brown picks a select event of finite duration and stays away from the career retrospective, which would have been a bit difficult to follow with two careers in the room and perhaps a third, if you include Anna Freud.

Freud’s Last Session keeps within the confines of a session, with Freud at times being the patient and the great Christian thinker the therapist, as Freud is aware of the nearing end and uses Lewis to test the veracity of his own beliefs about life on earth and the absence of a life hereafter.