Movie Review - 'The Last Station'

The Last Station Starring Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, and Christopher Plummer Directed by Michael Hoffman Rated R

Leo Tolstoy is famous for having written a book most people would never want to read. In its 2006 paperback edition, the classic novel War and Peace clocked in at over 1,400 pages...and it's a view of the build-up to and impact of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia told from multiple points of view. Not exactly Nicholas Sparks in a world with such short attention spans. Still, it says something that Tolstoy's legacy lives on even his masterpiece is often used as a punchline for something tiresome and way too long, and usually by people like me who have never tried to read the book. The basic familiarity 21st century culture has with Tolstoy makes The Last Station fertile soil for a historical bio-pic, because if you've never read his books, what are the odds you know how the writer lived his life? As it happens, Tolstoy was so influential in his native Russia, his anarchic Christian views made him something of religious figure in a quickly changing country toward the end of his life. Many years after his death, incidentally, Tolstoy's views on pacifism, developed around the same time as his religious redefinition, influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The trouble starts for Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) when he more or less renounces his considerable wealth and worldly possessions. How can the world's greatest living author, coming from aristocratic blood, reconcile all he has with his asceticism (roughly equivalent to abstinence from everything)? We take up Tolstoy's story as Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) is attempting to wrest control of the author's earnings and works away from him, and more to the point, Tolstoy's wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren). While Chertkov was the founder of the Tolstoyans, the adherents to the author's religious philosophy, gaining Tolstoy's trust over a quarter century of service as his secretary, Sofya was the polar opposite. Outspoken and not at all a believer in her husband's faith, she fought to have his life's work kept within the family. After all, she did bear him 13 children and perhaps more laboriously, copied the manuscript of War and Peace half a dozen times...by hand. It is a complicated chess games that has two pawns, Tolstoy himself and Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), a writer hired by Chertkov to literally write down everything that happens at the Tolstoy estate during his stay. Naive doesn't begin to describe Bulgakov, but perhaps at this stage, the same could be said of Tolstoy. They are both caught in the middle between two more forceful personalities, and it's clearly not a comfortable place to be for pacifist. The tone of The Last Station is a curiosity. It almost has a certain whimsy to it for about 25 minutes, then it approaches ribaldry for a bit, with a strange seduction scene involving Tolstoy and Sofya and a more conventional interlude between Valentin and Masha (Kerry Condon), who works at the Tolstoy estate. The last hour is much more hard-hitting, and though that's certainly the intention of director Michael Hoffman, that might be where The Last Station is least effective. It picks up again as it comes down the stretch, but you miss the movie it was for an extended period of time before that. The film has received two Oscar nominations, and it's where you'd expect them to be: Helen Mirren, who won a statue for The Queen four years ago, and Christopher Plummer, who astonishingly had never been nominated prior to this performance. You wonder why sometimes. The "make good" Oscar theorists would say he's overdue, and yet Peter O'Toole has eight nominations but somehow there's always a better option (not true in about half of those cases). Plummer inconveniently avoided nominations several times in his career, most memorably so Tom Cruise could hear his name announced for Magnolia instead of Plummer's brilliant channeling of Mike Wallace for The Insider. This is not a "make good" nomination, though. Plummer is more vital on screen than he's ever been, both in the film and in general, and even though he's playing a man near the end of his life, the actor is unconquerable. It's his misfortune to be in the category with Christoph Waltz, whose work in Inglourious Basterds was the best of the year by anyone in any category. Tough break. Together, Mirren and Plummer make a film that's otherwise slightly better than average a real acting clinic about an overlooked final chapter in a great artist's life. And they also make it a film worth seeing, and best of all, War and Peace is not required reading.

Comments

[howard]

Another movie about Russia with samovars, tea, trains,jewelry,forests, white buildings and a death scene

[SEAN]

Loved the film!

Brilliant work by all the actors involved...McAvoy is a real star, he is growing by the day into a fine fine actor & getting better..

Mirren & Plummer, wonderful, intimate performances, ravishing to say the least...

The film did have faults like you mentioned but I thoroughly enjoyed it...great work

[JEREMY]

Loved the humor!

This is a film about how people love and live. It's wise and funny at that, and a little dramatic at the end. Real movie stuff, great, great actors (not just the often-mentioned Plummer and Mirren). Very accesible, actually. They always say period drama is boring, but I did not find this boring at all.

[lucy]

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