Many a time, in pursuit of a more dramatic or artistic result, filmmakers take license with the truth, add stuff, change the order of things, make things up. And what's very mysterious to me is that they tend to overdo this especially when celebrities are involved. Look at the latest biographies that gained a screen adaption: they are drastically veering from factual events. More often the defense for such practices is that art is a form of expression, not of reality, but of the vision of the author. Surely, though, that vision must be predicated upon some amount of fact.
So here we are, watching a film about Freud debating God with C. S. Lewis for one hour and a half, but that seems to say more about Mark St. Germain - who wrote the play, based on a suggestion by someone else who died in the interim, then managed to turn it into a movie where he is the screenwriter - than either Freud, C. S. Lewis or the invented cameos/name drops of Tolkien and Einstein. It might even be more about Anthony Hopkins than anybody else, because all I saw was him being him and not the person of Sigmund Freud. Especially revealing is the small font paragraph at the end of the movie that says Freud met with a young professor right before his death, who might have or might not have been C. S. Lewis. Other than that, so the entire film, is pure conjecture.
How presumptuous and self indulgent, but also unintentionally ironic, to invent something that involves actual famous people who lived, and that thing being talking about the verisimilitude of religion and how people changed the story of a real life carpenter from Nazareth. Then not actually focus on Freud's work, Lewis' work or even Anna Freud's work, but on Freud's fear of death, the Christian reconversion of Lewis and Anna's lesbianism all on the background of the German invasion of Poland and England declaring war. For the entirety of the film, Anna Freud's character runs around London to get medicine to her father, only to arrive with female lover in tow and do a silent scene of determination and acceptance, all while her father was in terrible pain and she had the morphine on her. And there are so many scenes just like this.
Bottom line: haven't seen something so lazy and self indulgent except in movies about actors, meta constructions that feed back into themselves, with no beginning, end, or connection to reality. It's a movie in which Hopkins orates most of the time and everybody else is an extra and that has, as far as I can see, little relation to the actual people depicted in the film.
So here we are, watching a film about Freud debating God with C. S. Lewis for one hour and a half, but that seems to say more about Mark St. Germain - who wrote the play, based on a suggestion by someone else who died in the interim, then managed to turn it into a movie where he is the screenwriter - than either Freud, C. S. Lewis or the invented cameos/name drops of Tolkien and Einstein. It might even be more about Anthony Hopkins than anybody else, because all I saw was him being him and not the person of Sigmund Freud. Especially revealing is the small font paragraph at the end of the movie that says Freud met with a young professor right before his death, who might have or might not have been C. S. Lewis. Other than that, so the entire film, is pure conjecture.
How presumptuous and self indulgent, but also unintentionally ironic, to invent something that involves actual famous people who lived, and that thing being talking about the verisimilitude of religion and how people changed the story of a real life carpenter from Nazareth. Then not actually focus on Freud's work, Lewis' work or even Anna Freud's work, but on Freud's fear of death, the Christian reconversion of Lewis and Anna's lesbianism all on the background of the German invasion of Poland and England declaring war. For the entirety of the film, Anna Freud's character runs around London to get medicine to her father, only to arrive with female lover in tow and do a silent scene of determination and acceptance, all while her father was in terrible pain and she had the morphine on her. And there are so many scenes just like this.
Bottom line: haven't seen something so lazy and self indulgent except in movies about actors, meta constructions that feed back into themselves, with no beginning, end, or connection to reality. It's a movie in which Hopkins orates most of the time and everybody else is an extra and that has, as far as I can see, little relation to the actual people depicted in the film.