Word: sofya
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...writer/director Michael Hoffman's adaptation of Jay Parini's historical novel, Leo Tolstoy is played in grizzly glory by Christopher Plummer. Helen Mirren portrays the mercurial Mrs. Tolstoy, Countess Sofya, who fears her husband - and their fortunes - will be carried out on the shoulders of sycophants. The pairing of these two giants explains why the film, which doesn't open nationwide until February, is making a brief Academy-qualifying appearance in theaters...
...plays out as a parallel to Leo's. Arriving at their woodsy compound, Valentin cheerfully observes that it's a beautiful day. "Yes, but we'll pay for it," says the grumpy Sergeyenko (Patrick Kennedy). Except for a carnal handywoman named Masha (Kerry Condon), who serves as a mini-Sofya to Valentin's mini-Leo, the Tolstoyans are too busy trying to adhere to their standards - vegetarianism, living off the land, practicing celibacy - to appreciate either a beautiful day or the fact that Tolstoy himself doesn't live up to them...
...could he stick with the vow of chastity when he's got Sofya around? Mirren makes her funny, irreverent and passionate. (Only she could pull off a seduction scene that includes clucking like a chicken.) Sofya has proved her devotion by bearing Leo 13 children and copying out his drafts of War and Peace by hand, six times. She's prone to manipulation, eavesdropping and temper. "I lost five children, why couldn't one of them have been you?" she snipes at their daughter Sasha (Anne-Marie Duff), who is in Chertkov's camp. Sofya is not generous. Yet Hoffman...
...sure of Tolstoy's preferences. Throughout the movie, he wavers between Chertkov's will and Sofya's, but he never displays complete conviction toward either. As he waffles, our perspective shifts accordingly. Is this a writer who believes in power to the people and doesn't want to be nagged by his selfish wife in his last days? Or a confused old man, susceptible to flattery and not up to his own standards of mental agility...
...best - and private - end is certainly affecting, and that's what Plummer gives us. By the time we get to the "Last Station" itself, the Astapovo railway station where Tolstoy died, Hoffman finally lets Valentin fade into the background and the focus rest on Leo and Sofya. What you carry away from the movie is the reminder that a deathbed is the place where the living stake their possession for the last time and then watch it evaporate in irrelevance. Not a bad end for an imperfect movie...