19/18
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud invites Professor C.S. Lewis to discuss the existence of God, Freud’s unique relationship with his daughter, and Lewis’s unconventional relationship with his best friend’s mother. Anthony Hopkins had previously portrayed C.S. Lewis in Zemlja sjena (1993) 30 years before this film. Lewis is shown researching the Gospels while a woman who appears to be his wife beckons him to bed. This film is set in 1939, but Lewis did not marry Joy Davidman Gresham until 1956. The woman was actually Janie Moore, with whom Lewis lived until 1949. [last lines] Sigmund Freud: From error to error, one discovers the whole truth. Featured in The 7PM Project: Episode dated April 19, 2024 (2024). Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, ‘Enigma’ Variation 9: Nimrod Composed by Edward Elgar Performed by Symfonický orchester Slovenského rozhlasu (as Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra) and Adrian Leaper (conductor) Licensed courtesy of Naxos Music UK Ltd. It is 1939, on the eve of the declaration of war in London. Oxford professor C. S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) visits Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) at his invitation. He passes Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries) as she leaves to give a lecture and ponders whether she will reveal her lesbian affair to her father. Meanwhile, the two men attack each other’s philosophical beliefs. And that is what the film is all about, two men talking, interrupted occasionally by flashbacks to their younger days and air raids to give this piece of theatre some cinematic credibility. In this contrived scenario — although the story is that an Oxford professor visited Freud shortly before his death, the claim, as here, that it was Lewis is an invention of the play and the film — they argue among themselves and finally agree only that people are afraid of death. The rest… well, Freud’s beliefs are at the end of his life (he died three weeks after the supposed events of this film), while there are many things Lewis said up to twenty years later. As for the basic disagreement about religion versus science, that’s not a conflict; as smarter people than I have pointed out, science is about how, not why. If God created the universe we live in, thank you very much. Both men are good actors and easily translate the script into natural-sounding words. I have no idea whether Hopkins’ accent is a good impersonation of Viennese; Kohli Calhoun is listed as the dialect coach.