‘Freud’s Last Session’ Imagines A Debate With CS Lewis On The Existence Of God
(REVIEW) “Freud’s Last Session” wastes its fantastic premise of pitting C.S. Lewis against Sigmund Freud with boring execution and a bafflingly underwhelming portrayal of the famed Christian author that fits an odd pattern by people who often negatively portray him.
The news of “Freud’s Last Session” generated some excitement in Christian spaces, particularly among fans of C.S. Lewis, Both because it features Lewis and because the actor portraying Freud is Anthony Hopkins, someone who had once famously portrayed the writer in the classic film “Shadowlands.”
This film has had a fascinating journey to the big screen. It started out as a book called “The Question of God,” which pitted Lewis and Freud’s writings against one another on a myriad of topics, including God, suffering, sex and the meaning of life. That was adapted into a play, which invented a fictional scenario where Lewis and Freud met each and debated their ideas in person. This was what got turned into a movie.
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It’s no wonder why this premise has captured so many people’s imagination. Both Freud and Lewis loom large over the Western imagination and have become iconic avatars for their respective views of naturalism and Christianity. Atheists often cite Freud’s work, which explained away faith with psychology; Christians often cite C.S. Lewis to explain why faith is still valid.
“Freud’s Last Session” director Matthew Brown said the original book was what first really attracted him to the project.
“It immediately got its hooks into me, and I think about God quite a bit,” he said. “I had a lot of tragedy when I was young, and so it's something that just is very personal, I suppose, my own thoughts about all of that. But it just drew me to the material and those deeper themes of the story and science and religion being the question of our time and how their relationship is. So it got me.”
As he did research for the movie, Brown continued to find the two icons endlessly compelling.
“I learned a lot about both men during the research of this project,” he said. “And what I found was they both, like all of us, are human and they have very complicated personal lives. … You couldn't have found two people with more complex personal lives in some ways. So that was great for the film in the sense that it gives you really rich personal stories to look at, because you have the arc of the philosophical conversation. And then you've got the arc of the therapy session, for lack of a better word, for both of them. They’re each going through their own therapy session. And there's a lot to unpack with each of them.”
Matthew Goode, who portrays the British writer and scholar in the film, had a long relationship with the figure of C.S. Lewis, both from the “Narnia” books and the “Shadowlands” film, where his “childhood hero” Hopkins starred.
“He's been with me always, because as a child I read the ‘Chronicles of Narnia,’ which I absolutely adored,” he said. “And I didn't just read them once, I read them several times. And then there was — I suppose I can't not talk about Tony's performance. I knew the latter end of his life. But that was quite sort of encouraging, because when I spoke to Tony, he said, "I did my own thing." But he's a character. You're going to have to do your own thing with him, because although you have this voice, you’ve got your own information. It is just going to be very different to how I would go about it. And it's also a different part of his life. And I'm playing him from three or two, certainly two. I get him atheist, theist, and full-blown.”
There are parts of “Freud’s Last Session” that really work. The film does a good job of giving a “greatest hits” of Lewis’ and Freud’s views on various topics, like God and sex, where they align and where they differ — all without letting one or the other “win.”
The ability of both men to discuss these topics passionately, while also showing great love and care for one another when necessary, is at times, very moving. Also, the film’s attempt to add more cinematic touches works, such as when Freud walks into a flashback or the two of them run for a bunker and Lewis experiences PTSD. The acting is on point, with Hopkins the obvious standout.
But for a movie built around a debate between two great minds, the movie never develops the characters’ arguments very deeply or has them do any truly intense back-and-forth scenes. The film is so broken up by dull flashbacks and subplots that their arguments never reach any rhythm or fever-pitch, leaving the deeply emotional moments to feel abrupt and unearned.
Anyone who’s watched movies like “12 Angry Men” knows how a movie built around a debate between different perspectives can be deeply riveting. It’s annoying that this movie doesn’t even seem to attempt to reach its potential in that way. If — as a friend of mine has said — the most important rule of film is “Thou Shalt Not Bore Me,” this movie largely breaks that commandment.
Even more disappointing is Lewis’ portrayal. It in no way resembles the Lewis one encounters in his books. There’s none of that friendly and disarmingly kind British Christian wit. Instead, it is replaced by a stuffy and irritably insecure young man who is constantly scowling and upstaged by a charmingly cranky Hopkins who chews up the scenery as Freud. The whole point of a Freud versus Lewis fight-night is the same as a matchup like Batman versus Superman. It’s that ability to watch two icons go at each other.
The movie also seems to go out of its way to make Lewis personally look bad in perplexing ways. Unsurprisingly, for a movie featuring Freud, it portrays as true the historical speculation that Lewis was sleeping with a deceased war-buddy’s mother prior to becoming a Christian. And yet, it doesn’t make clear that it is equally apparent from the same scholarship that he stopped sleeping with her post-conversion — something that makes his apparent humiliating hypocrisy far less humiliating or hypocritical.
More offensively, it gives Freud, the Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a mic-drop moment where he says that the fact that Lewis responded to the air-raid false alarm with PTSD flashbacks proves he is a coward who doesn’t truly believe in God. Given how hard PTSD victims and counselors have worked to overcome the stigma that PTSD equals cowardice, it seems like a tone-deaf moment to include.
This impulse to humiliate Lewis in surprisingly sexist ways is a weirdly consistent pattern that I’ve never quite understood. “Shadowlands” portrayed Lewis as still psychologically a boy using his Christianity to protect himself from pain until his soon-to-be wife Joy breaks through his defenses and her death shatters his faith. Respectable people excitedly recount the story of how “a woman utterly humiliated him” in a debate at Oxford — even though the woman in question herself denied it and called that interpretation of events “projection.”
What’s interesting is that these, as well as the accusations of cowardice and sexual hypocrisy in “Freud’s Last Session,” all fit a pattern of attempting to emasculate someone by insinuation in childish, schoolyard fashion. In most other contexts I would assume these same people would decry degrading a man for those things as “toxic masculinity.” Why make an exception for Lewis is a question I wish Freud was around to answer.
If the film had lived up to its premise, the results could have been sublime. As it is — except for the truly die-hard Lewis or Freud completionists — this is one session that you can skip.
“Freud’s Last Session” is exclusively in theaters starting Dec. 22.
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Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.