“We’re all cowards before death.”
Grade: C
“Why am I here?” CS Lewis asks Sigmund Freud. Freud has invited Lewis to his London home in 1939 to find out why an intelligent man like Lewis believes in the God whom Freud calls a delusional lie.
It’s a promising social engagement yet halfway through Freud’s Last Session I wanted to ask its director and co-writer Matthew Brown the same question that Lewis asks Freud: Why am I here?
It’s just to hear Freud and Lewis talk apparently.
They talk very well.
Freud tells Lewis a truly dreadful joke about two Jews in a bath house and Lewis informs the shrink that his jokes are “as funny as a hanging.” Their dialogue is not just humour. Lewis tells Freud that the suffering in the world is the fault of man and not God. Freud then brandishes before Lewis a photo of his favourite daughter Sophie who died of Spanish flu and asks Lewis if man was responsible for that. Freud winces in pain from the oral cancer eating away at his jaw and says that he wished that the cancer had infected his brain instead so that he could hallucinate Lewis’s so-called benevolent God and exact his revenge on the deity.
Hopkins plays Freud and as always he can swerve and leap from slow, septuagenarian dignity to manic anger and sorrow. His acting agility is only made more delicious by its contrast with his age. Hopkins’ age is becoming more and more visible every time I see him on screen. His hair is getting whiter and his cheeks are becoming more and more hollow, but he can still grin and chuckle like the Cheshire Cat or Hannibal Lecter. His acting style is one of the most dramatic out there now because of his age and how his abundant energy defies his aged vessel.
Hopkins is well-balanced by the scholastic serenity of Matthew Goode’s Lewis. In this role, Goode proves what I’ve suspected: that he deserves more than the supporting roles that have kept him out of the spotlight. He dispatches lines like the one about Freud’s jokes with the erudite yet humble glamour of an English gentleman tilting his cards to reveal a winning hand. Goode could be the next David Niven if he got the right role.
Yet as well as Hopkins and Goode deliver the entertaining dialogue written by Brown and his co-writer Mark St. Germain, they cannot overcome the problem that the film is just talk. Nothing happens but talk and talk and talk. Freud and Lewis sit in Freud’s house all day going round and round on the subject of God and recycle arguments as old as St Augustine and not once does whoever is right actually obtain any tangible significance. Unlike in Ben-Hur or The Count of Monte-Cristo (2002) where the hero’s faith in God is what sustains them or dooms them in their quests, no one ever lives or dies in Freud’s Last Session if Lewis is right or if Freud is right. Their discussion remains ensconced in the drawing room.
I could only sit in Brown’s drawing room with Goode’s Lewis and Hopkins’ Freud for so long before I wanted to leave the cinema for the real world to write more of my novel, go fishing, or roast a pork shoulder, just to make something happen. Even delightful conversation wears thin without the heat of action.