In Theaters: The Last Station

Tolstoy, played by Christopher Plummer as a gracious old granddad with a distant career in radio dramas, is gentle with young Valentin, and seems to be something of a pushover when it comes to the movement's most aggressive agent, Vladimir Chertkov (played, with an actual twirly moustache to go with his bulgiest eyes, by Paul Giamatti). Indeed, the only person who can set Leo hollering is his redoubtable wife Sonya, brought to infernal, curtain-rending, occasionally charming life by Helen Mirren.

Sonya objects vehemently (Sonya does everything "vehemently," she's "Russian," although, like everyone in the film, she speaks like the Queen) to her husband's renunciation of his material possessions as well as the copyright to all of his writing, worried, as well she might be, about the inheritance due to her eight children (five of the thirteen she bore him died in childhood). The rivalry between Sonya and Chertkov is one of several stakes the film only half sets up, along with a forbidden romance between Valentin and another Tolstoyan named Masha (Kerry Condon), and the equally formative alliances that develop between Valentin and Mr. and Mrs. Tolstoy, respectively. These various plot components are no so much competing as unfinished; they prop up a droopy circus tent into which Hoffman tries to hustle too many players and too much hullabaloo.

The scenes between McAvoy and Condon generate a pleasant fizz that suggests a different movie, one more in line with the lighter fare that falls more directly within Hoffman's comfort zone (his 1999 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream comes to mind). Mirren and Plummer, however, asked to do some heavy historical sledding with a cardboard script, choose to simply yodel from the mountaintop instead. "I'm still your little chicken," Sonya chides Leo in one of a series of her attempts to manipulate him back to her side, "And you're still my big cock." It's not that I don't want to think about Tolstoy's cock -- really, under different circumstances I'm sure it could be quite fascinating -- but this scene of disingenuously scripted intimacy (the two dissolve into clucking laughter, supposedly evoking the ties that have bound them for 50 years) is an affront to good storytelling. Which I imagine Tolstoy would find even more offensive than a cheap dick joke.

Tolstoy held that love is the organizing principle in all literature -- a simple and yet infinitely revelatory idea. With the Tolstoyan movement, he seemed to want to merge reason with nature -- an intricate moral and social code with a more natural, less worldly way of life. Ambitious is one word for it, impossible another; the man himself admitted it all sounded better on paper, where it's easier to forget that human passion is as natural as it gets.

"Love cannot be weak-minded," Chertkov warns Valentin. "It cannot be naïve, or sentimental." It must be subjugated, in other words, to the intellect. "You are my life's work and I am yours," Sonya reminds her husband, asserting love as a human being's most productive obligation and aligning herself more eloquently and felicitously with her husband's movement than the filmmakers cared to notice. In their expressed conceptions of mature love and commitment, the chief rivals for Tolstoy's loyalty may have had more in common than they realized. It's too bad that rather than charting a clearly difficult but rewarding path, this facile, plodding film preferred to take the scenic route.

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