‘Freud’s Last Session’ review: Anthony Hopkins dazzles (again) in uneven film

Anthony Hopkins appears to be having a blast portraying Dr. Sigmund Freud in “Freud’s Last Session.”

In select theaters this week, the film sees the wonderful, Academy Award-winning actor as an at times gleeful and borderline-mischievous version of the famed Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis as he maneuvers around his London home, debating the existence of God, the human condition and more with an invited guest: C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), a don at the University of Oxford and the future author of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

“Freud’s Last Session” is written and directed by Matthew Brown, who adapted it from Mark St. Germain’s stage drama. It imagines this last-minute friendship of sorts — on-screen text at the film’s conclusion states that while Freud reportedly met with a young, unnamed Oxford don shortly before his death, “we will never know if it was C.S. Lewis” — allowing the doctor one final stimulating intellectual debate and, yes, a pseudo therapy session.

The movie is at its best when it’s simply Hopkins and Goode, the latter a skilled actor in his own right, who here seems largely content to give the former all the room he needs to paint this colorful portrait of Freud. It is somewhat less successful when it ventures away from them, spending time with Freud’s devoted daughter, Anna (Liv Lisa Fries, “Babylon Berlin”), a fellow psychoanalysis who is looking for a way to have a life with the woman she loves, Dorothy Buringham (Jodi Balfour, “For All Mankind”), an idea her seemingly very open-minded father has rejected.

Freud demands much from Anna, who must leave her work on this day when her father insists he can wait no longer for more medicine to combat his inoperable and ever-worsening jaw cancer.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of world conflict, as England’s prime minister, Arthur Neville Chamberlain, has vowed that the nation will declare war on Nazi Germany if it does not withdraw its forces from Poland.

Freud is no stranger to the Nazi threat, having fled his beloved Vienna with Anna, while Lewis wears the psychological scars of having served in battle during World War I.

Freud seemingly has invited Lewis to complain about the author’s first novel after becoming a Christian, 1933’s “The Pilgrim’s Regress,” but that proves to be little more than an excuse for what will become a rigorous, if still largely friendly, tête-à-tête.

“I never read your book,” Freud says.

After Freud gives Lewis a hard time for his lack of punctuality on this day — as the latter points out, this isn’t exactly the easiest time to travel, with sirens warning of possible bomb strikes and children being packed on trains for safety in the countryside — the verbal jousting truly begins.

Yet while they have key differences, most notably when it comes to faith — the man of science regularly refers to Jesus as “the good carpenter of Nazareth” and finds the idea that God exists to be “ludicrous” — they have other things in common, such as complicated childhood relationships with their respective fathers.

Again, this is mostly a showcase for Hopkins, the man once synonymous with his portrayal of colorful serial killer Hannibal Lecter who in recent years has reminded us just how compelling an actor he is with performances in films including “The Two Popes” (2019) and “The Father,” which, respectively, earned him an Academy Award nomination and a win. Here, he laughs and offers one-syllable sounds — largely Hopkins-ian “ah”s — after Freud gets certain responses from Lewis and breathes uncomfortably as Freud deals with his excruciating pain.

Meanwhile, Goode — a prolific actor who perhaps has never been better than when portraying Hollywood producer Robert Evans in the 2022 Paramount+ limited series “The Offer” — offers a lesson in restraint, only occasionally going big when Lewis is compelled to push back at Freud but mainly playing a man largely content to listen and take a few punches from this giant figure.

While watching “Freud’s Last Session,” you can’t help but think about “The Two Popes,” built around a fictional 2012 encounter between Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) and Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the future Pope Francis. However, “Freud’s Last Stand” fails to enthrall the way that film did, in large part because Brown (“The Man Who Knew Infinity”) — who co-wrote the screenplay with St. Germain — too frequently takes us away from where the real action is with cuts to Anna as well as lengthy flashback sequences. (We should note that those flashbacks, some of which occur in forests and others during combat, are beautifully filmed.)

While far from perfect, the film is well worth a viewing because when Hopkins is in the frame, it is class that is in session.

‘Freud’s Last Session’

Where: Select theaters.

When: Jan. 19.

Rated: PG-13 for thematic material, some bloody/violent images, sexual material and smoking.

Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.5.