contemporary world cinema for salmon arm |
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The Last Station
Country:
Germany, Russia, UK
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Best actress award ~ Helen Mirren~ Rome Film Festival 2009 Under the accomplished direction of Michael Hoffman, who also wrote the script from Jay Parini's novel about Leo Tolstoy's last days, The Last Station settles into a lushly scenic drama, featuring Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and the incomparable Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya. After brief initial glimpses of Tolstoy and Sofya, we are introduced to young Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy) who is applying for the job of the great man's secretary. A naïve zealot, a priggish follower of the worldwide Tolstoyan movement that espouses celibacy, communal property and passive resistance, Bulgakov is shocked to discover that the man hiring him expects him to spy on the Tolstoys as part of his duties. Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) is a devoted acolyte of the writer and leader of his international movement. He knows he has no greater enemy than Sofya, who wants the royalties from her husband's work to stay in the family, while Chertkov wants the copyright deeded to humanity. The real focus of this film, however, is the complex and compelling love story between Tolstoy and the woman who bore him 13 children, the woman who copied out War and Peace in longhand six times, the great passion and frustration of his life, Countess Sofya. From the opening shot of her descending a flight of stairs, the regal Mirren, whose father was Russian, creates a Sofya as conservative as her husband is anarchic, his opposite in any number of ways. Plummer plays Tolstoy as someone who has relaxed into his greatness. His Tolstoy has a largeness of spirit that makes it impossible to be constrained by anything, not even his own philosophy. “If The Last Station begins with a quote from War and Peace 's Prince Andrei that “everything I know only because I love”, it ends with our understanding of how complicated that simple sentence turns out to be”. K. Turan, LA Times |
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