The Last Station

If you took a Leo Tolstoy class in college or read one of his works during your time at the library and wanted to know a bit more about the man, don't really look to The Last Station. Does that make it a poor film? Not by a long shot.

The film follows the story of Leo (Christopher Plummer) and Sofya Tolstoy (Helen Mirren), married couple for 43 years, and the battle that raged between them at the end of Leo's life. As Leo's health is ailing, his long time friend Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) urges Leo to write a new will, renouncing his material possessions, leaving his wife and family with nothing. All of this is in order to have Leo's movement of peace to go to the majority. Chertkov sends a young follower of the Tolstoyan movement, Valentin Bulgakov, to investigate and inscribe all of Sofya's exaggerated and histrionic antics to work against her campaign.

Firstly, the film is A-typical period piece with all the correct elements of that type of film. Art Direction by Mark Rosinski and Heike Wolf, stunning costume design by Monika Jacobs, and a score to die for by Sergei Yevtushenko is pitch perfect and exalted brilliance. Nothing is wrong with this film technically.

An extraordinary narrative beautifully adapted by the director Michael Hoffman is one of the crowning achievements of his career. Dedicating his all for the sake of the art form, Hoffman writes and directs the screen with meticulousness and accuracy. Playing that extra special detail to smooth out an rough edges paid off for Hoffman immensely.

The cast presented in The Last Station is stellar and one of the best cast ensembles of the 2009. James McAvoy, proving once again, that you don't just lay down the words of your acting, you let the spirit fight its way through your soul and remain a tangible entity for your audience to engage. McAvoy proves he's one of Hollywood's most outstanding talents. Helen Mirren, riding the see-saw with her viewers, never declares any type of emotion until the bitter end. Mirren shows no apparent ambiance of mood or expression. She sizzles through the film, igniting every scene on fire along the way. Christopher Plummer as the lovable Leo is amiable, captivating, and entrancing. Plummer, a talent long overdue for Oscar recognition is enticing. Paul Giamatti, in a more villainous role we haven't seen of him before, is always dependable and alluring. Anne-Marie Duff and Kerry Condon are both enthralling in their roles respectively.

The Last Station is a definite contender for a Best Picture nomination. It's a delightful film full of heart, love, and heartbreak. The temptation of the films aura will lure you in and surely leave you in tears.

***½/****

Rather than present at least a GLIMPSE of Tolstoy's brilliance, Christopher Plummer depicts him as a one-dimensional, gruff, lovable old coot. He hardly has any lines throughout the movie, and the other characters are equally devoid of any depth. Helen Mirren's character is supposed to be self-centered and calculating, but even she breaks down into saccharine lightness at the end. The entire film is a descent into maudlin, pretentious sentimentality, and is only atmospheric, not substantive. Instead of being an accurate portrayal of early 1900's Russia, we are given "Russia-lite." We don't have a clue about Tolstoy's inner thoughts and motivations, because we see only an affable geezer. This was a squandered opportunity to reveal the mind of a complicated, social visionary. The director chose cute over interesting.

I've been looking forward to this movie for a while now and finally saw it last night. I thoroughly enjoyed everything about it! The entire cast was excellent; both lead and supporting roles were strong and added such depth to the movie. McAvoy, Mirren, Plummer and Giamatti were especially brilliant in every aspect. They each showed the strengths and weaknesses of the characters they portrayed, and it was a pleasure to see them interact. Although smaller roles, Duff and Condon played significant characters and were also very good in their portrayal. Just an amazing ensemble cast. I was surprised, and saddened, that this movie didn't get more attention; two nominations (Plummer and Mirren) was not nearly enough.

I've heard others say the movie was too slow but I can't say that the pace of the movie bothered me much. I found the story quite interesting and the scenery and costumes added to the movie without being distracting. I would certainly see this emotional and thought-provoking movie again!

"The Last Station" should have been great, but it settles for being merely good. Despite its impressive cast and juicy subject, something about it just doesn't quite click.

Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren play Leo Tolstoy and his wife in the days leading up to the writer's death, and the tumultuous relationship they shared, she feeling brushed aside by the author because of his commitment to his work and the Tolstoyan movement that developed around it. James MacAvoy plays a young man who scores the job of being Tostoy's assistant and becomes witness to this domestic drama and an unwitting accomplice to the machinations of Tolstoy's close friend and business adviser (Paul Giamatti) to wrest copyright of Tolstoy's works away from his wife upon the writer's death. If all of this sounds like a delicious set up for great acting and suspenseful intrigue, you'd be right; unfortunately, the movie is so much less than what it could have been.

Plummer and Mirren are wonderful in their roles, and the movie's best scenes are the ones of them together. However, they're not in the movie enough, and their relationship, which is the most interesting thing about the story, takes a back seat to the politics of the Tolstoy movement and MacAvoy's reactions to them. MacAvoy is a terrific actor and I've liked him in everything I've seen him in, including this. But I simply didn't care as much about his character as I did Tolstoy and his wife, and I spent the whole film itching for the screenplay to give Plummer and Mirren, two great British actors, more to do.

Paul Giamatti's character is oily and unlikable; indeed, there's something about Giamatti the actor that I find unlikable in general and actually makes it hard for me to watch him. Kerry Condon, on the other hand, in a smaller role as MacAvoy's love interest, is lovely.

Grade: B

The American director Michael Hoffman, in adapting Jay Prini's semi-factual novel about the last year in the life of the great 19th century Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, makes as his central character not the famous author but his wet behind the ears 23 year old secretary Valentin who is hired by Count Tolstoy's devout admirer Vladimir Chertkoff to both work for Tolstoy and spy on the countess, Sofya. She is not sympathetic to her aging husband's anarcho-Christian leanings, nor to the movement based on his philosophy, and fears the family will be deprived of the benefit of Tolstoy's copyrights.

Valentin, played fetchingly by James McAvoy, is a bewildered witness to the crisis in the stormy relationship between Tolstoy and his wife, which results in Tolstoy fleeing Sofya and his estate, only to die at a lonely railway station many miles away, with the world's media (such as it was in 1910) looking on. Unfortunately Valentin, based on a real person, is not only green but rather ineffectual and he is in the story as a witness rather than as an actor. One of the features of Tolstoyans was that they all seemed to have kept diaries and these provided Parini with most of his material. You can see why Hoffman made Valentin the central character, but his ineptitude is rather tiresome and his seduction by the lovely Tolstoyan Masha (Kerry Condon) (in contradiction to Tolstoyan-mandated chastity) is all a bit beside the point. It is the relationship between Leo (Lev) and Sofya that provides the real drama here, and the final scenes between them are genuinely moving.

Helen Mirren as the histrionic Sofya is alone worth the price of admission and Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy is convincing, though he demonstrates a lot more personal warmth than the real Tolstoy apparently did. Despite most of the filming being done in Germany the Russian atmosphere and countryside were well-evoked though I did wonder whether the serfs were real – none of them seemed to speak. There were also some inconsistencies in the screenplay – in one scene Valentin is at the Tolstoyan commune "two hours" from Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana, yet in a later scene he rides between the two places seemingly in a few minutes.

Apart from the love story (and Tolstoy did maintain that love was all that really mattered), the other theme is the contrast between high ideals and the personal power play evident in the "movement". The Chertkoff character (slyly played by Paul Giamatti) is a Machiavellian schemer, unlike his real-life model, and even if Sofya had been more level-headed she had something to fear. But in the end the politics peter out and what remains is the rather sad end of a great literary figure feeding a media frenzy. Tolstoy was not actually Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi (with whom he corresponded) but he deserved a more dignified death – he valued peace, not war.