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The Last Station is described as a melodrama - and I would say that's a fair description. It's the kind of film they don't really make any more. The spirit of David Lean lives on. It's beautiful to look at, for a start, and the music is genuinely incidental, lushing away in the background. We all know that Leo Tolstoy wrote a book, although few of us have the nerve to actually sit down and get to grips with War And Peace. But there was more to the great man than that - in his time he was regarded as godlike, and enjoyed a fairly big cult following, the Tolstoyan Movement, devoted to goodness, purity and equality - as long as it didn't mean the end of the deferential lower classes.

Tolstoy's young secretary Valentin is dropped into this, at the deep end. The 19th century Russian hippies, the fanatically devious disciple Chertkov who wants the great man to sign away the rights to his work, to the Russian People; the hard-pressed but manipulative wife determined to keep it in the family. And the girl who introduces the young man to the pleasures of the flesh. It's a great cast, headed by the unrecognisable Christopher Plummer, and the always marvelous Helen Mirren. The constant undertone in Tolstoy's saga is the disparity between his wish for a good life for the peasants, and the sight of those peasants beavering away in the background while the upper classes get on with their lives of pampered angst.

It's the growing struggle between the disciple and the wife, with the secretary pulled between new and conflicting loyalties, that will grab your attention. You really will care about these people. And what follows is the melodrama. I will say no more, except that it's a big story, told big. Just what Norma Desmond told us we had lost.

"Your works are the birthright of the Russian people." Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) in The Last Station

Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Leo Tolstoy drifted at the end of his life into spiritualism but of a more naturalistic kind, which disavowed materialism, espoused celibacy, and talked about the simple power of love. Michael Hoffman's The Last Station chronicles in historical drama fashion Tolstoy's (Christopher Plummer) struggle with his wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), over his desire to bequeath his works to the Russian people and thus, as she thought, deny her and her family rightful inheritance.

The film has an operatic tone due in large part to Mirren's occasional histrionics as she argues with Tolstoy and faces off Chertkov, Tolstoy's close friend and a force for the Tolstoyan movement, which espoused the writer's philosophy of austere life, feeling at times like a stripped down transcendentalism popular in 19th century America. The first half of the film has some electric moments because of Sofya's dramatics and her attempt to win over Tolstoy's new personal secretary, Valentin Bolgokov (James McAvoy). When the film turns to the business of Tolstoy dying, matters become slowly boring with overwrought lamentation and a slow up of the frenetic family dissonance of the first part.

The Last Station is a study in life's ironies: Tolstoy has been far from a celibate in life and therefore not a good Tolstoyan. Bolgokov is annoyingly enthusiastic about his new position and the tenets of the movement, except when he makes love to his new girlfriend, Masha (Kerry Condon) and even then he is such a prig as to be even more annoying than the histrionic Sofya. Recently innocent Richard narrated the story in Me and Orson Welles, and famously, Nick in The Great Gatsby. All three share in varying degrees intimacy with a famous person, with Bolgokov the least impressive.

Tolstoy does eventually die, Sofya gets the copyright, and I got an hour of splendid family invective along with my thoughts about the great writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina reduced to annoying bickering about inheritance. Yet I enjoyed those thoughts about a sublime writer as a flawed human being whose final philosophy was about love and peace. Love he had in abundance; peace did not arrive.

This was an excellent historical film based on the relationship between Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) and his wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren), during Tolstoy's final years. The film also explores Tolstoy's relationship with his Assistant, Valentin (James McAvoy) and his cabal of acolytes, lead by Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). The main tension comes between Vladimir, who wants Tolstoy to bequeath his copyrights to "The Russian People" and Sofya, who naturally would like the copyrights reserved for herself and family.

Mirren earned an Oscar nomination for Lead Actress and Plummer received one for Supporting Actor. I believe both were well earned. I liked the performance from the entire cast, particularly McAvoy as the adoring Assistant to Tolstoy. The screenplay was excellent and the Director, Michael Hoffman, did an outstanding job bringing pre-Communist Russia to life. The time period is 1910 and the cinematography beautifully captured the era. During the closing credits, actual film of Tolstoy and his Wife was run, underscoring what a great job the Director did in filming this.

A great movie and well worth seeing or renting.

"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

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/****