Movie Number 13 of 2024
The Movie: Freud's Last Session
The Cinema: Hoyts Victoria Gardens
Stars: 3
It probably wasn't the best idea to go see a movie after getting off a long red-eye flight that morning, but I wanted to be in a horizontal space for a bit and to bliss out for a while. Maybe, this was the wrong film to relax with. Ah, well.
But I've found an English film I didn't love. By all rights, this should be just up my alley - interesting topic, great cast, depicts England in the 1930s. But no. I left the cinema thinking this should have remained the stage play of which the movie has been derived.
What made me want to see this was the cast. Anthony Hopkins as a dying Sigmund Freud had a lot of potential. Then there was Matthew Goode, another favourite English actor, playing CS Lewis, a celebrated academic and author. In this fictitious meeting, Freud and Lewis meet to hash out who is right - Freud the atheist, or Lewis, the confirmed Christian who puts his place in God. The advertising says that this is an exploration of two men of differing opinions coming together to discuss God and Faith. Again, something that should be up my alley.
However, the film ambles. It doesn't have any impetus as we go from scene to scene, where some of Freud and Lewis's back story is covered, to the two men discussing all sorts of things without any form. We learn a bit about Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) who is torn between her own work, a new relationship and looking after her ailing father.
Although pretty to watch, the lack of any sort of cohesive action makes this a bit of a snooze fest. Which is a pity.
Freud's Last Session suffers from that rare affliction - the film that should have remained a play.
I'll leave it there. I was disappointed. If you want to see a brilliant film about C.S. Lewis, hunt out the 1993 film Shadowlands, in which Anthony Hopkins plays a wonderfully repressed Jack Lewis. It was nominated for many awards.
This film aint winning anybody nothing.
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