Leo and Sofya reach a temporary truce in "The Last Station."

(Michael Hoffman, 2009)

February 6, 2010

by Joel Crary

Photographs of Leo Tolstoy have always seemed strange to me. It’s as though the entire 19th century had been preserved in his face, only to be shoved unceremoniously out into the 20th and surrounded by the whirling gadgets of movie cameras and phonographs, a new era of record. On film, Tolstoy looks like an old man being born. It pulls time out from under the noble (and ignoble) ladies and gentlemen of his epics, which were written entirely by hand.

Think of that. I have a copy of “War and Peace” that I’ve been reading very gradually over the last few years. It’s almost 1,400 pages long, and Tolstoy wrote it by hand. We are informed in “The Last Station” that his wife Sofya transcribed the novel six times over, all by hand. She would go on to transcribe it at least once more after his death. Imagine the thought and consideration the woman must have given Tolstoy’s characters. It is inevitable that she would have found herself little more than one of them at times.

What draws me to Tolstoy’s works are his characters’ pensions for thought. He could write for pages and pages about a single character’s inner existential yearnings, and it’s fascinating to see them surface under the restraints of social propriety. He was a prolix writer, yes, but his style reflected the impulses and repetitions of the human mind. He let humans be human, down to their unceasing desire to become God.

“You all think he’s Christ,” Sofya (Helen Mirren) charges her husband’s (Christopher Plummer) followers at a luncheon table; “He thinks he’s Christ.” Alive in the onset of the industrial revolution and Modernist panic over the authority of God, Tolstoy’s philosophies made him a needed figurehead for the pacifist movement. Close friend Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giammati) saw in him a cause to preserve, but an opportunity to ensure his own immortality as well. Christianity wasn’t founded by Christ, after all.

“The Last Station” studies the Tolstoy household at the end of the author’s life, when Tolstoyans were already gathering in droves at a commune and devoting themselves to the rules – no sex, no wealth, no violence – outlaid by Chertkov and those claiming responsibility for Tolstoy’s legacy. A young man, Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), is hired on as a secretary, charged by Chertkov with keeping tabs on Sofya’s influence. Valentin meets a girl, Masha (Kerry Condon), who isn’t much one for rules.

Adamantly opposed to Chertkov and his ilk, Sofya is losing sleep over the details of her husband’s will. Both parties want to determine the fate of Tolstoy’s copyrights. Tolstoyan principles would place it squarely in the public domain, along with the author’s finances. Sofya engages in a series of fits and starts, emitting wails that can be heard across Russia, breaking a lot of plates and hurling herself dramatically onto sofas. It’s not that Tolstoy seems immovable; rather, the attention of the movement, whether he agrees with it or not, is good for his ego.

A lack of Russian inflection in the dialect hurts the film’s authenticity (falling for that “let’s just make them British” standby), and everything drags a bit once everyone is introduced and writer/director Michael Hoffman starts feeling out the relationships. The Valentin/Masha dynamic is routine boy-meets-girl material, with the boy experiencing a sexual awakening. McAvoy’s career potential is staggering. The scene in which he meets Tolstoy for the first time indicates a well of emotional awareness bubbling within the young actor that will inevitably gain him great recognition. The veterans Plummer and Mirren are a delight to watch together, and the melodrama of their interactions is the stuff of Tolstoy’s writing: prolonged and histrionic.

The third act, a recreation of Tolstoy’s death at Astapovo station, breathes new life into the narrative, is paced well and represents a sorting out of Hoffman’s romantic concerns. Much of the film takes stabs at the nature of love in systems that seem to prevent it, but there is a genuine wound inflicted when Sofya sits in a railway car, prevented by Chertkov from visiting her dying husband, who lies only yards away. Between them patrols a newborn parasitic field of media technology that over the 20th century will proceed to kill the romance of the epic author.

I recall a powerful scene in the film’s first half. After the Christ accusations fly, a phonograph is played with Tolstoy’s voice booming out of the loudspeaker. Everyone present is visibly taken aback by the novelty. Tolstoy rises out of his seat and moves away, annoyed. Sofya replaces the record and operatic music fills the air, bringing Tolstoy to a halt. “That’s better,” he says simply, but with a type of quiet reverence. Art was Tolstoy’s cause. The next century would do everything in its power to exploit it.

“The Last Station” begins showing at the Bytowne Cinema on Friday, February 12th and will play through Thursday, February 25th.