The Last Station

Though a film about the last days and later ideals of Tolstoy sounds as hard going and gritty as being stuck in a sandy carriage on the trans-Siberian railway, The Last Station plays out like any other well thought-out period drama. Focusing on the taut and frayed relations within a big rich family, the main difference, and the main point of interest, is that the big jolly Santa-looking chap is literary giant Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer). Plumber plays Tolstoy like Gandalf's long lost brother; hearty chuckles are as deep as the healthy smattering of aphorisms he delivers with a worldly twinkle.

A rough idea of Tolstoy's key ideals can be surmised in a line: the intellectual emancipation of the working masses is an important step worth risking a great deal for. More specific details are not important to the story told here. Rather, we're dealing with a sentimental tragedy exploring what happens when love, ideology and self-interest battle for supremacy.

At the height of his fame, Leo Tolstoy was the most celebrated writer in the world. Yet his constant criticism of the state made him unpopular with the Russian government who invariably attempted to silence him. Here, his most trusted fellow ideologist Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), also the subject of government oppression, hires young secretary Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy) to work for Tolstoy. Given an additional secret task of spying on the relationship between Tolstoy and his wife, Chertkov requests that Bulgakov record his observations in a small black diary.

Bulgakov soon finds there is an enormously destructive tension over Tolstoy's last will and testament between Tolstoy's wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren) and Chertkov. Chertkov is pushing Tolstoy to leave the rights to his works to the public realm so that his ideas will be freely available, while Sofya has obvious qualms about handing over her main source of financial stability after Tolstoy's death. On top of that she herself agrees with few of Tolstoy's political and religious ideas.

Our sympathy for the two camps see-saws wildly as their attempts to refute and tarnish the other get increasingly heated. Giamatti's cold manner and animated eyebrows make it all too easy to pitch him as the pantomime villain attempting to rob the dying Tolstoy and his beloved widow. But as Sofya's constant whining and china-throwing become increasingly grating, our sympathies for her predicament begin to wane.

Tolstoy's own dictum, "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is played out as patches of love shine momentarily through the rages of jealousy. This is mainly down to Helen Mirren's fine performance which is more than worthy of her Oscar nomination. She flips convincingly between tortured wife and doting lover; one second slithering charm, the next hurling plates against the wall in furious rage. Plummer and Mirren make a very convincing Mr and Mrs Tolstoy, their fraught bickering resembling the spats of any other fatigued couple about who used up the last of the toilet roll.

This is essentially a story of love, loss and the fragility and strength of the family unit. Although the focus of the film is supposedly on the literary master Tolstoy, you'll leave feeling cheated if you buy your ticket hoping for a precis of his ideas, but then that'd make for quite a rubbish film.