A note at the end informs us that near the end of his life — and near the onset of World War II — pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was visited by a young Oxford don in his London home. Well, home away from home: he still pines for his beloved Austria, but it’s not so good there for Jews at the moment — even, perhaps especially, famous Jews, and especially especially Jews who are famous for rejecting religion and other traditional bases for morality. But back to the matter at hand: what Matthew Brown’s adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s play (which is based on Armand Nicholi’s book The Question of God) supposes is that the young don was none other than C.S. Lewis, a fairly recent convert to Christianity who lampooned Freud in his update on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Narnia is still a long way off, but the book’s allegorical character hints at Lewis’ sympathy toward myth, which puts him on common ground with Freud, while its Christian perspective sets him in testy opposition to the cancer-ridden, morphine-sipping, emotionally tyrannical atheist. And yet, despite his frailty and failings, Freud largely gets the better of their various sparring matches, mostly because he seems like more of a person, and has stories to go along with his ideas. (His embittered “Great plan, God,” after recounting the death of his wife and child elicits only silence from Lewis, which seems right.) Brown does what he can to keep things from feeling like a filmed play, but he can’t do much, and what he does do — flashbacks, dream sequences, a war scene, and a trip to an air raid shelter — isn’t always helpful. Anthony Hopkins enjoys himself as the old man, while Matthew Goode seems a bit tentative for a zealous convert. (2023) — Matthew Lickona
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