Turning a fabulously operatic, thematically replete true-life tale into a frosted slice of dinner theatrics, The Last Station conveys nothing more convincingly than its own self-regard. The story of Leo Tolstoy's last days, in exile from his own home, his wife, and possibly the social movement he spearheaded toward the end of his life, rivals any the great novelist could have dreamt up for himself. And yet The Last Station, adapted from Jay Parini's 1990 book by writer/director Michael Hoffman, seems to have been mounted by everyone involved like it was their own private troika -- a period vehicle which might carry them to award glory, or the set of their next self-regarding costume piece.
Serious questions about the life and death of Tolstoy, whom no less a humanist than Anton Chekhov called "a perfect man" -- his gifts, his beliefs, his marriage and professional relationships--are merely chipped about on the lawn of Yasnaya Polyana, seemingly without aim or purpose. With so little narrative authority at hand, it seems, the actors easily overtook the asylum.
James McAvoy is the first if not the chief offender. Revisiting the role of the young ingénue awed, overcome, and then bitterly educated by his proximity to a powerful man (which first brought him to prominence in The Last King of Scotland, where he played the doctor to Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin), McAvoy here plays Valentin Bulgakov, a 23-year-old aspiring to join the "Tolstoyan" movement. Founded as a system that combined passive resistance with socialist ideals, a dash of morbidity and strict personal asceticism, Tolstoyism captured the mood and the loyalty of a small cache of Russians (in 1910, a series of stark inter-titles inform us, some regarded the novelist as a living saint), which occasionally included Tolstoy himself.
Valentin enters the Tolstoyan compound (located close to Tolstoy's estate) all a-quiver at the prospect of becoming a secretary to the great man, and because Hoffman prefers to express in three scenes what could be well established in one, McAvoy quivers plenty. (This makes for a tiresome, tell-don't-show progression: If "He's leaving!" are the first words of one scene, you can be sure that "He's gone?" will be the first of the next.)
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.