Worth: $13.00
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Cast:
Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Fries
Intro:
If you don’t really care about these people or their ideas and their differences, then their revisiting of the old debate about whether God exists seems strangely stale.
Sigmund Freud has an assured place in the history of ideas. People who have never ploughed through The Psychopathology of Everyday Life or the case studies, will still have a vague notion of ideas like the Freudian slip or the Oedipus Complex.
As a Jew in Austria in the 1930s, Freud was forced to flee the Nazis and trade his beloved Vienna for West Hampstead in London. He moved there for what turned out to be the last years of his life.
In this film, directed by Matt Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity), we concentrate upon a famous visit (which may not actually have happened) between Freud and Prof C. S. Lewis, the Christian thinker and Oxbridge Don who is best known today for his Narnia books. The film is all set in Freud’s house and mostly consists of the two ‘great men’ sparring. Freud was famously aggressively atheistic and regarded religious belief as part of humanity’s infantile need for father figures. Lewis tried to square his academic life with a slightly proselytizing approach to sharing the idea of Christian love.
The film starts with Lewis (the always reliable Mathew Goode) arriving in London by train. He is late and a little flustered. Freud, ever-ready to read unconscious motive into the smallest of actions, gives him a hard time about this. But really, we feel that Freud would have found something to pick on if it hadn’t been that arrival time. He is quite hostile and combative. Of course, he is suffering from advanced-stage cancer of the jaw, which even regular doses of cocaine will not fully assuage.
From there on, it is mostly a battle of ideas played out as a battle of wits. There is a small part for Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), but this seems mainly there to make the point that she and Freud are in an unhealthy co-dependent relationship.
The film as a whole doesn’t quite work, although it is competently directed and scripted. Part of the problem is Hopkins, who is an odd choice here. It is very rare indeed for him not to nail a part, but somehow, he seems miscast. There is too much of Tony and not enough of Sigmund somehow. Admittedly, playing semi-mythical historical figures must be hard. His Freud is a sort of childish point-scorer, which does fit with what the biographies tell us, but he is also not very adroit, which is surely wrong. At least Hopkins doesn’t affect a Middle-European accent, which is a blessing. Goode is prim and naïve. He comes off slightly better with the less well-written part, but of course, he has the advantage that few people would have much idea of what C. S. Lewis was actually like.
If you don’t really care about these people or their ideas and their differences, then their revisiting of the old debate about whether God exists seems strangely stale. The chemistry between them is good in places but it is not enough to lift the film into much more than a tame British historical drama.
