Wick's Review

Summary - Really Great 4.5

Celebrity, genius, marital complexity and misguided idealism collide in this loose recreation of Leo Tolstoy’s last year on earth. A resplendent movie – Helen Mirren’s performance and costumes alone are worth the price of admission – The Last Station doesn’t require the viewer to know that Count Tolstoy was a rich aristocrat and cultural phenomenon. Nor that the author of War and Peace inspired a cult of Christian anarchists and pacifists called the Tolstoyans.

One needn’t even appreciate that Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer in an Oscar nominated performance) was the original limousine liberal: his bleeding heart leading him to give away his most valuable assets … at the end of his life. (Yeah, right. Whatdaya think his wife thought of that idea?)

The movie brings all this to life, mixing in a fictionalized Tolstoyan ingénue couple (James McAvoy & Kerry Condon) whose copulating antics up the sexiness quotient while serving as a proxy for the audience. One suspects Tolstoy would have approved of this dramatic device.

The story feels fresh and even modern, notwithstanding that it occurred a full century ago. Talk about a marriage with issues: Leo and Sofya Tolstoy were the Tiger and Elin Woods of their day, with then new media recording their every public move.

Their flamboyantly tempestuous relationship – “unhappy in its own way” in Tolstoy’s immortal words – charms as it informs. Celebrity, luxury, and misguided idealism make the Tolstoys recognizable to the marrieds of today’s wealthy post-industrial society. The effect is positively Tolstoyan, literarily speaking.

Acting - Really Great 4.5

Dame Helen Mirren’s Oscar nominated performance as Countess Sofya Tolstoy rivals her Oscar winning Elizabeth II in The Queen. Playing a monumentally accomplished woman – mother to 13, literary partner to the world’s greatest novelist, aristocrat – Mirren reveals profound depths of cunning, caring and charisma. Acting gets no better.

Dame Helen declares it “one of the great women’s roles in film. So often women’s roles could be described as ‘long-suffering’, but Sofya is the opposite of long-suffering! She doesn’t suffer anyone for any length of time. She is a wonderfully tempestuous and passionate person. She’s also very funny. It’s a fabulous role. Whatever scene she’s in, Sofya simply dominates. That’s very nice to play. She just comes in, hijacks a situation and takes it over with passion and charm.”

Christopher Plummer’s Leo Tolstoy rises to the occasion as a quintessential lion in winter. Still, his performance feels a touch artificial, whereas Mirren’s feels completely authentic.

James McAvoy serves as the audience’s proxy, playing what’s become a stock role for him: naive young man manipulated by dominant acquaintances, as in Wanted and The Last King of Scotland. Here he’s an empty vessel to be filled not only by Tolstoy and his scheming associates but also by the strong woman who seduces him, sending him head-over-heels in love.

Kerry Condon fetchingly plays the libertine woman who sweeps McAvoy off his feet. Together they impart youthful sex appeal – and sex – to this movie about an elderly couple.

Paul Giamatti – never less than interesting to watch – chews the scenery a bit as Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s overly ambitious Tolstoyan promoter.

Film - Really Great 4.5

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”¹ The Last Station paints Tolsoy’s family as both happy and sad, as in his dotage he grandiloquently forswears two indulgences he’d enjoyed his whole life: wealth and fornication. This hypocritical act reflects poorly on him, since his family and followers were asked to make sacrifices that he avoided his entire life.

Peasants are rarely glimpsed in Michael Hoffman’s film, mostly when a Tolstoy is riding in an elegant carriage pulled by two white stallions. Thus is Count Leo depicted as a limousine liberal of his day.
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¹ The famous opening line to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Edge - Risqué 2.2

Nicely sexy, explicitly so with Kerry Condon’s overt seduction of James McAvoy, and romantically so with Countess Sofya’s (Mirren) subtle seductions of her husband of 48 years. Married couples – no matter how troubled – could learn a thing or two from how this powerful pair regularly rediscovered the spark in their relationship, notwithstanding the very real issues in their marriage.

Reality - Glib 1.1

The Tolstoy family had several generations of service to the Czars in their pocket – many illustrious, some notorious – by the time Leo came along to feel guilty about the family fortune.

Why compare Leo and Sofya to Tiger and Elin? He was the aloof über celebrity of his day, while according to Wikipedia, their “marriage was marked from the outset by sexual passion and emotional insensitivity when Tolstoy, on the eve of their marriage, gave her his diaries detailing his extensive sexual past and the fact that one of the serfs on his estate had borne him a son.” So while Sofya never attacked Leo with a golf club, one suspects she and Elin would have had plenty of notes to compare.

Effectively an anti-Burkean man of the Left, Tolstoy didn’t realize that property rights aren’t to be forsworn; they’re to be spread. His watery socialism would shortly be trumped when Soviet Socialism spread its suffocating grip over Mother Russia, and from there over as many countries as it could conquer or subvert. Thank God that abomination is now behind us.

1 Comment

• Wick Feb 19, 2010 11:38PM

  Regarding Wick’s Review
  I published this last night, prior to Tiger’s club house statement.

  Our aloof über celebrity’s got a long way to go but took a big step this morning.

  Leo did most of his carousing prior to marriage, giving Sonya his wild oats diary prior to their marriage. The cad.

  So Tolstoy paced Woods in arrogance, if not in score.

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