A Última Estação

There is nothing to fault in this movie, really, and pretty much everything to praise.

The script is very good. The characters are fleshed out and developed in complexity as the movie goes along. You continue to learn more about them, see more facets of their character.

And they are realized by first-rate performances. There is not a weak one in the batch.

The direction is also very fine. There is not really much of a plot here; it's more of a character study. Still, the director keeps things moving along, never veering into the sentimental or the cute. You grow to like these characters a lot, but there is no attempt to yank your emotions.

My only very slight reservation about this movie is just a personal preference. I went into it knowing virtually nothing about Tolstoy's life or the movement that was developed out of his later writings. I would have appreciated a little dialogue somewhere explaining more about that. I realize, however, that that is not the norm in modern movies, and I certainly had no problems following what was going on without it. Viewers such as myself will just have to go read a book about Tolstoy for that additional information, which is certainly not a bad thing.

This is not a film for the ages, a Citizen Kane or a Rules of the Game, a Potemkin or such. Still, it is a very well-crafted movie, one that I could easily watch again with no diminished pleasure. One that, as well, I can recommend to anyone who enjoys good acting and watching interesting characters being developed by and through it.

"The Last Station" from 2009 looks at the last months of Leo Tolstoy's life.

Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) finds his relationship with his wife of nearly 40 years, Sofya (Helen Mirren) untenable. At one time, Sonia was his partner, helping him with his writing. Now that's over, and she feels abandoned by her husband and the Tolstoyan movement which she feels is determined to disinherit her. One of the major Tostoyans, Cherkhov (Paul Giamatti) wants Tolstoy to change his will so that his work can be put in public domain.

Sofya, a jealous and angry woman, searches her husband's papers and tries to get people to spy for her to find out what Cherkhov and her husband are up to. She views Cherkov as she would another woman interfering with her marriage.

After the fights, tantrums, and suicide attempts, Tolstoy, a frail old man, can handle it no longer and leaves her in the middle of the night. But that doesn't stop Sofya from trying to find him.

This is a wonderful, passionate film with beautiful acting, particularly by Mirren, who has the showiest role as the irrational and crazed Sofya.

Excellent film, well worth watching.

"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

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.

"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.