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When “The Future of an Illusion” invoked a psychoanalytic way of thinking to critique religion, Freud (1927) persuaded a century of followers that psychoanalysis and religion belong on the same debate stage. Freud's Last Session (Brown, 2023), a film based on Mark St. Germain's play of the same name, puts them on the same screen and assumes that the audience will benefit from listening to a discussion that never happened between Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and C. S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), who never met. This may strike one as odd. Yet, the screenwriter, St. Germain, and director, Matthew Brown, are entitled to artistic license—and, they made up a debate between Lewis and Freud based on a book, The Question of God, by Armand Nicholi (2002).
Nicholi paired Freud and Lewis because, even though Freud died without knowing most of Lewis's work, their writings seemed to be in sync in an uncanny way, creating a dialogue in which each seemed to be questioning and answering the other, albeit in different decades. The dialogue contains a lively interchange about the existence of God but, in the end, it is an irrelevant argument that makes the film itself irrelevant on two grounds: (1) The Judeo-Christian tradition posits hospitality to the stranger—the outcast, the poor, the downtrodden—as the core ideal and commandment. Belief in the existence of a divine being is irrelevant. In Judaism, one can be a good Jew, even a rabbi, without believing in God. Only hospitality—care and feeding, binding wounds, protection, shelter—to the stranger matters. (2) Whoever scored more points during this film's fictional debate about God's existence doesn't matter, because neither Freud nor Lewis would argue against hospitality to the stranger.
I will not explore sound or screen editing, nor will I be discussing acting. Except, one must note that Brown directed Goode to play Lewis as anxious and humorless, and St. Germain's script portrayed Lewis in his middle years as God's apologist, who ar