Hhere is a resolutely old-fashioned drama, detailed and elaborate but also straightforward and watchable in its way. It is a Stoppardian what-if meeting, suggesting a bruising encounter between two celebrated historical figures who could theoretically run into each other; it was adapted by director Matt Brown from a stage play by American playwright Mark St Germain, in turn inspired by a 2002 book by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi that seized on a report that Sigmund Freud just before his death met an unnamed Oxford don. . What if that don was CS Lewis, the Christian apologist who in his 1933 book The Pilgrim’s Regress mocked atheist Freudianism and every other kind of wicked fad?
Anthony Hopkins plays Freud at the end of his life in exile in London in 1939 as war breaks out, in pain from oral cancer. Matthew Goode is Lewis (also once famously played by Hopkins himself, of course, in the film Shadowlands), for whom fame through the wartime broadcasts and Narnia bestsellers was still in the future. Hopkins’s Freud is quarrelsome, angry and ill-tempered; Goode’s Lewis is smug and haughty. Lewis says Freud’s worldview is morally elusive; Freud smilingly suggests that Lewis’s emotional relationship with the mother of his fallen First World War comrade is classic neurosis.
There is no great meeting of the minds here, and in fact the drama would be unbearable if it were not triangulated by the figure of Anna Freud (sharply played by Liv Lisa Fries), who is bullied and oppressed by her father, who rages through the rain run to deliver. the medicine he demanded quite unaware that the selfish old brute had quite forgotten that he had asked for it. Perhaps not a terribly profound movie, but robustly executed and an interesting reminder of the dusty old debates about to be swept away by the great horror of WWII.
