In 30 years, Anthony Hopkins
morphed from C.S. Lewis into Sigmund Freud and from a mere Christian into a committed
atheist.
That’s all just on the screen,
of course.
In 1993 Hopkins, one of the
finest actors on Earth, portrayed Lewis, possibly the greatest Christian writer
of the 20th century, in the movie, “Shadowlands.” Debra Winger played
the woman Lewis married late in life, Joy Davidman.
And in “Freud’s Last Session,” released in 2023 and available on streaming services, Hopkins has the title role in a compelling fictional conversation with a younger version of C.S. Lewis.
Hopkins, 86, is on a roll. In
another 2023 film, “One Life,” he is much more humble as the real-life Sir
Nicholas “Nicky” Winton, who led a World War II effort to save almost 700
Jewish children, transporting them from Prague to London as the Nazis closed
in.
It’s unlikely that Freud, the legendary
pioneer of psychoanalysis, and Lewis ever met, although a statement at the end
of the Freud film claims that an unknown Oxford professor visited the real Freud
a few weeks before his death.
Freud, born of Jewish parents in
the Austrian empire, moved to London in 1938 to escape Hitler’s rampage, and he
died in 1939 of oral cancer after asking his doctor to give him lethal doses of
morphine. He was 83.
The movie places the visit of the two intellectual giants on Sept. 3, 1939, which would have made Lewis 40 years old – less than half Freud’s age. Lewis lived until Nov. 22, 1963, a week shy of his 65th birthday. He died on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Don’t expect two hours of dry,
intellectual ideas being tossed across a desk in Freud’s London study. The
stimulating repartee is broken up with flashbacks to the boyhoods of the pair,
a depiction of Lewis’ experience in the World War I trenches and a subplot
involving Freud’s daughter Anna.
In the film, both men are
confident and assured of their positions on the existence of God. Each thinks
the other is wrong, with Freud calling Christianity a “fairy tale,” but each
also is respectful of his rhetorical opponent’s academic qualifications and
beliefs.
Hopkins is intense at times as
he portrays a man in physical pain and still sorrowful from the death of his daughter
Sophie in her 20s during an influenza epidemic. Matthew Goode, 46, whose
character married Lady Mary in “Downton Abbey,” gives a subtle performance as
Lewis. He seems to be restraining himself at times when he would like to make
points about his faith.
“Freud’s Last Session” is adapted
from a play of the same name by Mark St. Germain, which is based on a 2003 book
by Armand Nicholi, “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate
God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life.” Nicholi took statements that both men
wrote and brought them together into a back-and-forth discussion. Some of
Lewis’ well-known assertions show up in the movie dialogue, including his idea
that all humans possess an innate knowledge of right and wrong that must have
been implanted globally by a creator.
Alexandra
Mellen of “Christianity Today” magazine pointed out one lively exchange in the
film:
Freud: “Your God who created
good, or whatever that is, he must have also created the bad, the evil. He
allowed Lucifer to live; he let him flourish. But logically he should have
destroyed him. Am I correct? Think about it.”
Lewis: “God gave Lucifer free
will, which is the only thing that makes goodness possible. A world filled with
choice-less creatures is a world of machines. It’s men, not God, who created
prisons and slavery and – bombs. Man’s suffering is the fault of man.”
Mellen said film director
Matthew Brown’s brother-in-law, a pastor, told him the film is as fair and true
to Lewis as to Freud. “What he loved about it was it allows Christians to have
their faith challenged,” Brown said. “That’s a very important part of being a
Christian. And I’m hoping that could be said for the other side, too.”
The movie doesn’t end with a
“winner.”
“The weird thing is, everybody thinks the other side won when they see it,” Brown told Mellen. “My Christian friends think that Freud was more convincing, and vice versa, the psychiatric community thinks that Lewis won. It’s fascinating.”
