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Created Feb 18, 2010 10:51PM PST • Edited Mar 24, 2019 12:50AM PST

1. Quality

2. 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.

4. 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.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

   Plummer

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

   Mirren the Magnificent

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

   Condon

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

   McAvoy and Giamatti

10. 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.
    -——————-

    ¹ The famous opening line to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

12. Play Great 4.0

    Sofya tends to her marriage as a deeply beautiful woman can, seducing her husband time and again. That is, when she’s not raging against him and her children. Her lines – especially given Helen Mirren’s monumental delivery – are the high point of this great script.

    Also exemplary is how the story pierces the hypocrisy of Tolstoy himself regarding the Tolstoyans. The great man becomes bemused by how doctrinaire his followers turn out to be. Such ideological amplification would repeat itself again and again in the 20th Century, most notably in the deeply inhumane Soviet Union that was soon to take over Mother Russia.

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0

    Helen Mirren’s costumes are as sumptuous as those in The Young Victoria, set some 75 years earlier and nominated for the Costume Design Oscar. Why wasn’t The Last Station also nominated for Best Costume Design? Guess it’s a fashion victim of sorts.

15. Content

16. 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.

17. Sex Erotic 3.1

18. Violence Gentle 1.4

19. Rudeness Salty 2.2

21. 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.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.4

    Tolstoy’s secretary (McAvoy) and his nubile lover (Condon) are apparently fictionalized creations from Jay Parini’s source novel.

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0