Once, they were happy collaborators; she copied out the pages of his titanic novels, and deepened his understanding of the women he created in fiction. But recent years have pulled them apart. The author of War and Peace reinvented himself as a prophet, married to his dreams and the movement that clustered around them as much as to his wife.
Based on Jay Parini’s novel, The Last Station is a fictionalized yet essentially truthful account of Tolstoy’s final days. It’s a feast of great acting that has earned Oscar nominations for its co-stars. Christopher Plummer plays Tolstoy as a complicated, fully rounded man, not a stick figure signifying greatness, and Helen Mirren endows Sofya with passionate, roiling emotion. While loving her husband despite his new preoccupations, she is scornful of his ideals and contemptuous of the true believers gathered at his feet. Tolstoy’s favorite disciple, Chertkov, is depicted with apt understatement by Paul Giamatti as an odious little man bent on recreating the great author in his own image.
Tolstoy, however, has mixed feelings about the adoration of his followers. “Let me assure you, I’m not a very good Tolstoyan myself,” he says, horrifying the self-righteous Chertkov with his self-deprecating good humor.
The mechanism of The Last Station’s plot is sprung by one of the film’s least interesting characters, Tolstoy’s star-struck new secretary. Valentin (James McAvoy) is sent by Chertkov to spy on the old man as the Tolstoy estate swirls with intrigue over the great man’s will. Chertkov wants the valuable rights to the author’s work to pass into the hands of the Tolstoyan movement as a public trust. Sofya wants them for herself, and her children choose sides. Unhappy wealthy families are all alike.
Tolstoy was acclaimed as the world’s greatest living writer and was—as shown in The Last Station—surrounded by the rudiments of celebrity culture with photographers, motion-picture cameras and barking reporters gathered on his doorstep. His fans hung on every word and scribbled his utterances into notebooks. He demanded a return to agrarian simplicity but found himself at the center of modern complexity. Tolstoy’s vegetarian, pacifist, celibate asceticism can be seen as an effort to wrest the monastic tradition of Russia’s Eastern Orthodox faith from the hands of an official church that had become an instrument of the state. He preached that all the world’s religions share a core truth: love. Despite his benign philosophy, he was a difficult man to live with.
Directed by Michael Hoffman, The Last Station is elegantly attired with a lavish attention to the visual appearance of Russia on the eve of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. But like a superb stage play, the marital rows and regrets, the emotionally and historically believable dialogue between Tolstoy and Sofya, are the heart of the story.
Opens Feb. 12 at the Oriental Theatre.
*/?>
