The life of Leo Tolstoy is certainly not as interesting as the man’s works, which include War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both regarded among the best novels ever written.
Tolstoy, the man, was born into Russian nobility. His parents died early on and he was raised by relatives. He attended Kazan University and his teachers deemed him unwilling to learn, and then he gambled. Too much. Finally, after surviving his debt, the man wrote. And wrote well.
Writer/Director Michael Hoffman knows this, and finds the conflict of his Tolstoy film The Last Station more in those around him and their respective relationships to his inherent greatness, starring Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy (a decidedly supporting role), Helen Mirren as his attention-hungry wife Sofya, Paul Giamatti as the potentially two-faced friend Vladimir Cherthov and James McAvoy as the new young secretary stuck in the middle of it all.
The film presents Tolstoy as he was, an old man still contradicting of his written beliefs (he promotes celibacy but loves sex, promotes public space but lives within a large private estate), against the Tolstoyans, a small group of Russian Christians who live by the philosophical and religious sentiments of the great writer. Cherthov, the movement’s founder, is determined to get the movement off the ground and needs Tolstoy’s work to be owned by the public in order to do so. This requires Tolstoy to amend his existing will and take the rights away from his family. Cherthov, who sits in house arrest at the film’s opening, employs the strict young Tolstoyan Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy) to serve as secretary in the Tolstoy house and spy of any domestic developments, most especially regarding the conniving Sofya, who despises Cherthov.
Sofya, of course, does not want the will changed. She feels she (and her family) deserves the right to her husband’s work, which she aided him with throughout their life together. Mirren’s Sofya, in a conversation with Bulgakov, boasts of copying War and Peace by hand six times and even helping her husband edit the dialogue of the female characters in his novels. The entitlement is there, and not entirely undeserved.
The viewer’s conflict echoes Valentin’s conflict and, thus, the conflict of the entire Tolstoyan movement. What is to be gained in a completely free, completely celibate world void of distraction. Who has the fun? Who does the work? And who gets the credit?
Valentin must face both sides of the equation; in one ear Sofya, the other Cherthov, two forces competing for the legacy of Leo Tolstoy.
That said, there is no antagonist in the narrative. Everyone loves the great man in one way or another, and even sex (which does happen, much more than it should by Tolstoyan standards) is regarded as somewhat necessary and natural.
McAvoy continues to do good work, here channeling Brian Jackson from Starter for 10, only 100 years earlier. Valentin sneezes when he’s nervous and does a lot of snnezing. It’s a funny little gag by Hoffman that’s never overplayed. Plummer counters this unsure young man with an equally unsure but far more comfortable old man. In one inspired scene, Tolstoy and Valentin walk together in the woods discussing a lover of Tolstoy’s early life. The writer asks the young man if the affair matters or not in the scope of life, to which Valentin replies “I don’t know.” “I don’t know either,” Tolstoy, both concerned and curious by the lack of answer.
These two are the dreamers, while their confidants (Sofya and Cherthov) battle it out on the playing field of rationalization, wielding very un-Tolstoyan emotions and means in doing so (jealously, manipulation, etc.).
The biggest flaw in the film is the writing, which fails to capture a feel for the dialect of the time or the weight of Tolstoy’s following. Granted, English actors speaking English in Russia nearly a century ago is a hurtle to get over. Luckily, Hoffman’s rather stale dialogue/historical context is livened by universally passionate turns by world-class performers. When Sofya puts on grandiose fits of sickness and anger at both her husband and his evil friend Cherthov, one feels both for and against the wife much in the same way Tolstoy does.
This is, after all, far from a biopic. It’s not concerned with Tolstoy the way Attenborough was concerned with Chaplin or James Mangold was with Johnny Cash (and thank God for that). Hoffman’s interested in how Tolstoy’s works and actions were interpreted by those around him, for better and worse.
And while it most certainly would look and play out much better (and stronger) on the stage, watching these actors light up the silver screen is a delight. No question about it.
7 out of 10
What did you think of The Last Station? Are you excited to see it?