Word: tolstoys
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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...
...They do not disappoint, although the movie, while effective in portraying the complications of any life lived publicly, is on the whole less eloquent than its principals. It is structured on the belief that we need an expository guide to get the complexities of the Tolstoy's life, offered in the form of Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), a nervous, good-hearted young secretary sent to the Tolstoy's country estate to help Leo with his papers. Valentin arrives as a pawn of the Countess' sworn enemy, the exiled Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), who urges him to keep vigilant...
...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...
...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...
...Waffling is not a great source of dramatic tension, but watching a public man struggle to figure out his own 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...