imaginary meeting of Sigmund Freud and Clive Lewis

“According to Freud” is being released, a ridiculous film about an imaginary meeting between two outstanding thinkers of the 20th century, the author of which, American Matt Brown, intends to tell his viewers how to think in the 21st century. Unsuccessfully.

Text: Zinaida Pronchenko

“According to Freud” is the second film in director Matt Brown’s career dedicated to, let’s say, academic topics. In 2015, Brown filmed in a rather lean manner the story of the torments and joys of the Indian mathematician-autodidact Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose role, naturally, went to Dev Patel. Having dealt with the exact sciences, Brown took on more controversial matters – psychoanalysis and theology. In his new film, terminally ill Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) amuses himself while awaiting death in the company of writer Clive Staples Lewis (Matthew Goode). In reality, they did not meet, although they could have, since Freud ended his days as an emigrant in London, in Hampstead, and Lewis then lived relatively nearby, in Oxford, along with other famous members of the Inklings intellectual circle. Why did Brown need to reunite in the frame an atheist who believed that the anal phase in the formation of personality is more important than familiarity with the Ten Commandments, and who, under the influence of his colleague Tolkien, believed in the immortality of the soul of the author of The Chronicles of Narnia? Time will most likely give an answer. The conversation between Freud and Lewis takes place in the first hours of World War II. Reports from Poland, where Hitler had just invaded, serve as the backdrop to their persistent dispute over the same questions: if God exists, then how did he allow the triumph of evil, and what should a person do now – turn the other cheek to Adolf or dig trenches? As the world is once again in turmoil, Brown, like hundreds of other artists, finds it useful to draw significant parallels. As a result of such efforts, history actually repeats itself twice – the second time in the form of a pathetic farce on the big screen. After all, a more hackneyed creative solution than Hitler as the measure of all things and tyrants has not existed for a long time. Nevertheless, Brown seriously begins to leaf through the calendar, and there he again sees September 1, 1939.

The main failure of the film, however, is not even the lack of imagination of its author, but the presence of Sir Anthony Hopkins, apparently, in moments free from dancing on Instagram (owned by the recognized extremist and banned in the Russian Federation Meta company) minutes, intending to outplay absolutely all the old people – noble, crazy , nasty, dying. Several years ago we saw his efforts to remember everything in an unbearable “Father” Florian Zeller, then patriarchal convulsions in “Son”, in February 2024, “One Life” was released, where Hopkins mourns for two hours the innocent murdered Jewish children whom his hero Nicholas Winton did not manage to take out of Prague in the same 1939. Now here is Freud coughing up blood. It is curious that from role to role Hopkins does not change his acting set at all: he moves exclusively sideways, when leaving, he does not leave, like Lieutenant Columbo, he ends every second line with a sarcastic “yes, oh yes.” In Brown, in addition to the traditional grunting, Hopkins performs a truly deadly act – he forces his counterpart to take a false jaw out of his mouth, because the oral cavity is destroyed by cancer, about which the film has a separate ironic short story, akin to a nightmare: The Creator seems to hint to Freud what blasphemous things lead to theory – to the oral phase. It must be said that at this moment the unfortunate Matthew Goode, who once shone with Woody Allen in Match Point and Tom Ford in “To a lonely man”reaches impressive acting heights – the horror written on his handsome face makes one believe that these two actually met and discussed, over a test tube of morphine, “The Roundabout or the Pilgrim’s Progress,” Lewis’s main book about the benefits of faith in goodness in an era of unabashed evil.

However, evidence of the existence of God, who is obliged to show us the path to salvation even today, is not the only plot that interests the director. Fortunately, in this picture, hopeless from all points of view, there was little room for the suffering of Freud’s daughter Anna, a character of obvious interest to filmmakers. Her relationship with her authoritarian father, her own scientific research, her love affair with Dorothy Burlingham – all of this is outlined, alas, on the dotted line by Brown. And really, what do we need Dorothy when the fate of humanity is at stake? Neither Freud nor Marx, who appeared in the discussion, could give a final answer to the question of what to do. It is possible that the task was set incorrectly. “Why us?” – this is a riddle that requires, as never before, intense reflection. Everyone is forced to decide for themselves, parallels with the past, religions, great art – nothing works. And in this logic, it makes no sense to reproach Matt Brown for a naive picture based on Wikipedia. We know who is to blame. Unfortunately, they will figure out what to do without us.

In theaters from April 18

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