BY G. CONNOR SALTER

If you’re going to make a play into a film, how do you get past the stage?

It’s an old problem.

As filmmaker Nicolas Roeg said, the problem is that “a play is a different experience. It isn’t a film, and the plot unfolds with words only. You can think a play is wonderful, but in turning it into a film, you must inevitably change it.”

Roeg was speaking about his movie Insignificance (more on that later), but his point applies to any play made into a movie. The last movie based on C.S. Lewis’ life (The Most Reluctant Convert, written by Max McLean from his one-man play) changed the play by treating the narrator as Lewis going through past scenes of his life. You might call it the Ghost of Lewis Present telling you the story of his past. Freud’s Last Session, written by Mark St. Germain and Matthew Brown from St. Germain’s 2009 play, takes a more conventional route. The question is whether or not its route works, and whether it could have works better.

The play is a two-hander set in one room: Sigmund Freud’s London home. On September 3, 1939, Lewis visits at Freud’s invitation to discuss religion. Freud is interested in how an avowed atheist with Lewis’ intellectual pedigree could embrace religion. Their dialogue about faith and their lives is intercut with radio announcements about whether Germany has advanced into Poland.

Since the standard play-into-movie method is to open things up, the filmmakers did what seemed natural: add flashbacks that demonstrate what the actors speak about, then fill in the outside world the actors allude to.

Flashbacks range from the dramatic (Freud’s daughter being arrested by the Nazis, Lewis nearly dying in World War I trenches) to the quaint (Lewis arguing with Tolkien about faith as they walk home from a pub, Freud remembering his daughters playing with his grandson).

The implied outside world gives the play suspense. Radio announcements make Lewis and Freud’s talk about life, death, and faith feel serious. They know England may be at war with Germany when their conversation finishes. Though neither character says it, the radio announcements reminding them about Nazism’s threat to Jews (Freud is a Jewish atheist who fled when the Nazis invaded Austria) informs their conversation about the problem of evil.

So, the movie fills in the implications. Lewis sees child evacuees getting on trains to leave London as he arrives in the city (a nod to the evacuee guests who will inspire his Narnia stories). Sounds of planes buzzing overhead cause Lewis to check outside for bombers. Air raid sirens cause the two men to shelter in a church, leading to a discussion about Lewis’ World War I trauma. And so on.

The play also features several moments where Freud discusses or phones his daughter—Anna Freud, his caregiver as cancer eats at his jaw, but also a noted psychoanalyst. The movie shows Anna going about her day, caught between work responsibilities and caring for her father. She becomes the movie’s emotional center, which makes structural sense. Freud and Lewis don’t change much in the story: they begin and end their conversation without admitting any changed opinions. They gain new respect for each other and perhaps an unspoken understanding that Lewis’ behavior (helping Freud with his jaw prosthesis, never rising to Freud’s blunt Germanic inquiries about his sex life) demonstrates he lives out Christ’s humility and grace. But neither changes much as the story. In contrast, the movie routinely shows Anna struggling with whether she grow, stand up to her father. Including whether she should tell him about a certain someone in her life.

So. We have a movie that opens up the play’s two-hander. A movie that fills in much of what the play implies. The question is whether the additions are true to the history and whether all the pieces (flashbacks, cut to Anna’s life) work to make a cohesive whole.

The core story works well, though perhaps not as well as onstage. Partly, that’s because the play was designed to have Freud be the heavy: a man in his eighties nearing death who talks with a blunt accent chews a lot of scenery. Anthony Hopkins gives a curious accent (sometimes European, sometimes Welsh) but gives a strong physical performance as Freud. He talks dramatically, fills his scenes with little visual tics as he searches for his cigars, scratches his head, points at a figurine on his desk, and so on. Occasionally, one remembers how often his mentor, Laurence Olivier, was praised or chided for his meticulous mannerisms. In fact, Olivier’s performance in the mystery movie Sleuth isn’t unlike this role—the older man who balances charm with boorishness as he verbally spars with a younger man. More on that later.

Matthew Goode is equally good as Lewis, although the dynamics put him in a box. Lewis could be an overpowering presence—Humphrey Carpenter reports he once staged a mock duel in his office to surprise a difficult student. He was more eccentric than suave—Carpenter reports Lewis often wore shabby suits and a dung-colored hat to protest against the effete fashion popular among students when he came to Oxford. But there can only be one lumbering scholar in this story. So, the play and movie script treat Lewis as a graceful young fellow who reacts to Freud, parrying more than attacking. Goode spends most of the movie playing second fiddle, but he does it with poise and makes a believable transition when the third act lets him go on the offensive. It may not be the historical Lewis and may not have the powerhouse acting that his scene partner gets to do. But that’s the script. Until someone writes a play where Lewis gets to be the heavy (perhaps about a tutoring session with his Oxford pupil John Betjeman), this is what we have to work with.

If there is a problem with how the movie handles the main story, it involves props. The play only shifts from cerebral to visceral whenever Freud describes how his jaw prosthesis pains him. He even comments about his dog avoiding him because the dog smells death. Eventually, Lewis helps him remove the prosthesis—aware that a doctor is supposed to do this, and Freud is a very breakable 83-year-old. The moment works in the play. Here, less so because the pain isn’t communicated enough. Some scenes (Freud holding a handkerchief to his jaw) suggest the pain increases as the two men talk, but neither Hopkin’s performance nor the visuals convince us that the pain is worsening.

There needs to be, well, a little more David Cronenberg. I don’t mean that Freud’s Last Session needs more gore—blood gushing from Freud’s jaw and so on. But, as I’ve observed elsewhere, Cronenberg creates horror by showing a body changing: breaking, being altered. Bodily knowledge (how bodies move, shift, or break) pervades all Cronenberg movies in subtle and shocking ways. Including A Dangerous Method, his 2011 movie about Freud and Carl Jung. This movie, with its scenes where Freud opens his cancer-ridden mouth and tells C.S. Lewis, “Hell is in here,” could use some of that dark sensibility.

So much for the (mostly effective) main story. What about the flashbacks and other additions?

The most notable Lewis flashbacks involve Mrs. Janie Moore—played by Orla Brady, to the best of my knowledge, the first actress to portray her on film. In the play (and in Inklings studies), Mrs. Moore is a thorny subject. They met because Lewis knew her son, Paddy, in World War I and promised to care for her if Paddy didn’t survive. They shared a home from 1918 onward, and early biographers assumed it was a foster mother-son relationship. In the movie, as in the play, Lewis bristles when Freud pushes him to define this relationship. He refuses to say whether something romantic went on before his conversion.

The flashback scenes are ambiguous but imply something was going on. The closest Brady and Goode get to intimacy is her joking about Adam and Eve when she finds Lewis reading Genesis in his study, followed by hugging. Throughout these scenes, Brady appears almost a mother figure but more likely a lover. It’s all finely handled and may show that St. Germain and Brown wrote these scenes after 2021 when a posthumously released Walter Hooper interview confirmed that Lewis had an affair with Mrs. Moore during his atheist period.

Given the new revelations, scholars likely won’t be upset by these almost-illicit flashbacks. What may irritate some scholars is how graceful Mrs. Moore appears here. A far cry from the temperamental, selfish figure that Lewis’ brother Warnie portrays in his diaries. While it’s true that Warnie and others recorded Mrs. Moore as controlling and difficult, we don’t know when she became difficult. Warnie didn’t move in full-time with Lewis and Mrs. Moore until retiring from the army in 1932—a year after Lewis came to faith, by which point the affair was over. To my knowledge, no one has shown that Warnie knew (whatever his suspicions) that anything illicit occurred during the 15 years between his brother meeting Mrs. Moore and Warnie moving in with them. Hence, Warnie doesn’t consider that the controlling behavior he witnessed was Mrs. Moore—a lifelong atheist, likely upset at losing a lover to religion, still sharing a house with her former lover—reacting to her loss. Freud’s Last Session gives a plausible portrait of Mrs. Moore before the affection disappeared and bitterness arrived.

The expanded material about Anna Freud present more of a problem. As mentioned earlier, they involve Anna struggling over how to care for her father and how to share a secret about a certain someone. The certain someone is Dorothy Burlingham, the Tiffany heiress who met Anna in the 1920s while studying psychoanalysis. The two women collaborated on research and shared the Freud home in London for decades. Scholars continue to be debate whether the relationship was platonic or not. When Dorothy’s grandson wrote her biography, he took the platonic view, which led Washington Post contributor Stephen Birmingham to complain that the lack of sex or other intrigue meant readers had little to interest them in Dorothy’s story.

The movie never features Dorothy and Anna outright stating their relationship. The closest thing to romance is Sigmund having a delirious hospital vision where he imagines seeing Anna and Dorothy in bed together. Still, the scenes (Anna asking Sigmund if Dorothy can move into their home and the women cautiously but confidently entering the house to talk with Sigmund) leave little doubt about what the script implies.

As noted earlier, the Anna material makes structural sense. Freud and Lewis don’t have overt character journeys in the play. Conventional screenwriting logic says someone has to have an emotional journey. Anna is the play’s implied third character anyway (never present, but mentioned many times). The play even has a brief reference to a salacious detail about her life (the patient in her 1922 paper on sadomasochistic fantasies was herself, and her father was the analyst). So, her having an emotional journey about admitting her sexuality and her father struggling to understand her inner sexual desires or outer sexual choices makes for good screenplay material.

The struggle becomes that since we probably will never know for sure what the nature of their relationship was, making it sexual feels messy. It raises the question whether we are following the facts, or making the material more salacious because we find stories about single or celibate people boring. As Lewis says in Freud’s Last Session, society has become so open about sex that we can’t seem to stop talking about it. It becomes difficult to imagine a story about a woman who may have had a lasting platonic relationship. It becomes (as characters observe in the David Payne play Lewis & Tolkien, Of Wardrobes & Rings) difficult to talk about long-lasting male friendships like the Inklings had without asking if there is something sexual going on. So, Freud’s Last Session makes a commercial, structurally sensible choice to spice things up, but perhaps creates historical problems along the way.

Some readers may say at this point that whether Freud’s Last Session goes outside the historical record isn’t surprising. Biopics do this all the time. Therefore, an equally important question is whether the changes amount to a good film. What is the rate of return for the risk?

Sadly, not much. Between the main narrative, flashbacks, and additions, the movie has many elements. But very little holds these elements together. The filmmakers do change the play—and as Roeg said, you inevitably have to do that.

However, as mentioned earlier, Roeg was talking about his movie Insignificance, which makes a difference. Insignificance has a broadly similar structure to Freud’s Last Session: several famous people talk for a few hours about life (their lives, what life is about). Roeg’s characters (Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio, and Joseph McCarthy) have fewer connections than Freud and Lewis. The movie cares less about the historical record and more about using these characters as symbols in its story. And Roeg uses a lot of flashbacks to get his story across.

The difference is that Roeg was famous for turning flashbacks into something greater. His movies (most notably Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth) are filled with flashbacks and flash-forwards, often confusing when viewed individually. But he always used them to create a larger vision—even if, as movie editor Tony Lawnson said, the vision is that questions matter more than answers. In the case of Insignificance, the question is what accomplishments (movie fame? Sports fame? Catching Communists?) are truly significant, especially in light of the atomic bomb that Einstein feels partly responsible for. Roeg knew how to bring many fractured pieces into a coherent story.

Freud’s Last Session could potentially have taken the Roegian route. It could have opened up the play in adventurous ways. For example, when Freud tells Lewis about Anna’s paper based on her own sadomasochistic fantasies, it could flashback to Lewis in his teenage years writing letters to Arthur Greeves about sadistic fantasies and signing them Philomastix (“whip lover”). Most audiences would find it strange, but using the flashback several times with more detail would get the point across.

Indeed, there are one or two moments where recurring images tie scenes together: a deer keeps showing up in Lewis’ scenes, symbolizing sehnsucht via natural beauty. Freud’s hospital vision includes seeing some figurines from his desk (two angels embracing or fighting, perhaps a scene from Paradise Lost, a book that he mentions earlier). However, these recurring images are few and rare. The movie doesn’t provide enough visual hints to make a larger vision.

It’s not entirely the script’s fault. One could have kept the script like the play (skipped the flashbacks, avoided the Anna subplot) and made it interesting with clever editing. The aforementioned Sleuth does exactly that: the story seldom leaves one location, but the editing intercuts the main coverage with glimpses of props that mean something to Olivier’s character or his opponent. Admittedly, Sleuth benefits from its two characters talking about murder, not apologetics. But anyone who has seen the very similar movie Deathtrap knows that even a clever murder mystery can feel stagey on film.

All things considered, Freud’s Last Session isn’t a bad film. It’s probably as good as it was ever going to be. The odds that anyone would fund a version of Freud’s Last Session with radical editing choices or a radically deconstructed script are small. And while it makes some dubious choices by going against Anna Freud’s narrative about her life, those choices make sense on paper.

Every change in this movie makes good structural sense, good marketing sense, and good budgeting sense. The struggle is that when plays-turned-movies take this route, they still may not make good cinematic sense. Most of the time, the changes have to be radical to make a good film.