Leo Tolstoy wrote enormous novels that reached the very pinnacle of literary art. He was a master of both quality and quantity, which may be why The Last Station, a new movie about the end of Tolstoy’s life, confuses the two. You will certainly see better acting in a great many motion pictures (including from the cast of this one), but it is unlikely you will see more. To say that the actors — Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, Christopher Plummer and Paul Giamatti, among others — overdo it would be an understatement. I can’t handicap their Oscar chances, but isn’t there a scenery-eating contest every summer out on Coney Island?
Plummer plays Tolstoy as a kind of volatile Russian Santa Claus. When he laughs, it is a great, lusty laugh. When he shouts, it is a deep, abdominal bellow. And when he capers around his bedroom clucking like a chicken, you can be sure you are witnessing a world-historical feat of poultry impersonation. Mirren, as Sofya Tolstoy, the great man’s wife, matches Plummer howl for howl. She smashes crockery, enters rooms in a state of operatic dishevelment or regal calm and seems determined to restore literal meaning to the word henpecked. Not to be outdone, Giamatti twirls his moustache to denote his character’s villainy, and McAvoy does what he usually does, which is mime wet-eyed, stricken, lovable innocence, but this time in a more Russian way than he has before.
McAvoy plays Valentin, a nervous young man hired to be Tolstoy’s secretary. In the twilight of his life the writer has ascended from man of letters to spiritual guru, attracting disciples to a vaguely defined movement led by Vladimir Chertkov (Giamatti). This utopian project, which includes a commune of sorts not far from Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, has alienated Sofya. She complains, not without reason, that Chertkov and his flunkies are trying to marginalize her and manipulate her husband into changing the terms of his will.
Valentin manages to gain the confidence of both Tolstoys. Leo flatters the young man by inquiring after the progress of his work, while Sofya quizzes him on the state of his love life. This centers on Masha (Kerry Condon), a fresh-faced Tolstoyan who brings tea to Valentin’s bedroom at the commune and returns later to bestow other favors, in spite of the supposed Tolstoyan commitment to celibacy.
All well and good, but The Last Station, written and directed by Michael Hoffman (The Emperor’s Club) and based on a novel by Jay Parini, is the kind of movie that gives literature a bad name. Not because it undermines the dignity of a great writer and his work, but because it is so self-consciously eager to flaunt its own gravity and good taste. The humor is mirthless; the pathos is daubed on like jam on a blini, and the shuffling of books and papers substitutes for real intellectual energy. Hoffman has, in press materials, invoked the spirit of Chekhov, but instead of the stringent, sympathetic intelligence that Chekhov would have brought to this material, there is bombast and grandiosity.
Which is a pity, because a rich and peculiar story lies underneath the histrionics. Tolstoy’s fame was an early form of modern celebrity, with proto-paparazzi ranged around the gates of Yasnaya Polyana and the rural train depot that gives the film its title. His marriage could have been a novel in its own right, an epic of loyalty and betrayal. His temperament as grand and paradoxical as any in the annals of literature. All grist for a fascinating movie, for sure. But this isn’t it.
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