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MovieMail's Review
The Oscar-nominated pairing of Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren are the beating heart of this exquisitely-shot drama of Tolstoy's last days, says Nick Riddle.
This year marks the centenary of a legendary - and complicated - marital bust-up between the ageing Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya Tolstoya. The Last Station, adapted by director Michael Hoffman from Jay Parini's novel, is an exquisitely shot drama based on several accounts of the proceedings.
Hoffman portrays the Tolstoy estate in the waning days of pre-Revolutionary Russia as a troubled idyll presided over by the whiskery patriarch (Christopher Plummer) and his redoubtable wife (Helen Mirren) - a kind of elderly Oberon and Titania, forever quarrelling and reconciling. As the film opens, the callow young Bulgakov (James McAvoy) is thrilled to be hired as the great man's secretary, only to find that the man who appointed him, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), the leader of Tolstoy's utopian movement, expects him to report back on what he hears. Bulgakov finds himself drawn into a bitter dispute between Chertkov and Sofya over the royalties from her husband's work: Chertkov wants Tolstoy to bequeath them to the Russian people; Sofya is naturally outraged by the idea. She's none too pleased, either, that the deeply flawed man she has lived with for 48 years is now considered a living saint.
Sofya cajoles, berates and seduces her cantankerous husband, while Chertkov presses his case and Tolstoy is forced to choose between two betrayals. When he flees his estate and his family, the lush rural scenes appropriately give way to the bare, man-made surroundings of Ostapovo railway station, where Tolstoy's final decline becomes the 1910 version of a media circus.
Giamatti is good value as the idealistic but shifty Chertkov, and McAvoy's diffident charm has never been better employed, but it's Plummer and Mirren who are the beating heart of the film (both were Oscar-nominated for their performances). Plummer's Tolstoy is an old rogue but a passionate one, given to petty cruelty as well as to great sensitivity. The long-suffering Sofya could easily have come across as shrewish and unbalanced (Hoffman's excellent screenplay skimps just a tad on the more egregious aspects of the real Tolstoy's behaviour), but Mirren's performance is all strength and dignity. It's a tremendous portrayal of a remarkable woman.
An historical drama starring the Oscar-nominated Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, The Last Station is based on the final chapter in the life of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.
Christopher Plummer stars as the famous writer, who is nearing the end of his life after a long period of ill health. He lives with his family in a compound at Yasnaya Polyana, attended to by his wife and the disciples of his 'movement': a group of people dedicated to his ideas of pacifism, vegetarianism, sexual abstinence and communal property who have gathered in a nearby forest camp. When the head of the movement, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), urges Leo to rewrite his will to posthumously renounce his material possessions, thereby leaving his family with nothing, Tolstoy's wife Sofya (Helen Mirren) does all she can to influence her husband and protect her inheritance.
