Review

Review Date: 14-February-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

The Last Station (2009)

The Last Station contains enough emotion and food for thought to warrant a miniseries. Taken from the pages of history, it deals with love, death, sex, jealousy, family strife, human weakness, the hunger for truth, and the Russian soul. Some of these concepts and the characters who illustrate them are thinly fleshed out, yet writer/director Michael Hoffman succeeds in crafting a satisfying whole around a central idea — that no religion, movement, political system, or cause can live up to the ideals that spawned it because it depends on people, so what really defines a life are small-scale forces like connections with others.

The story unfolds through the eyes of a young man named Valentin, who adds to James McAvoy's résumé of roles eclipsed by flashier co-stars (see The Last King of Scotland and Wanted). The year is 1910, and Valentin lands his dream job as secretary to the great novelist Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer). Valentin's admiration for the famous count is not merely literary; he is an ardent member of the Tolstoyans, a socioreligious sect devoted to the writer's beliefs about chastity, the renunciation of property, and simple communal living. Valentin is hand-picked by Tolstoy's friend and the promoter of the sect (Paul Giamatti), who asks him to record everything that goes on in the writer's household. This is because the main threat to the Tolstoyans is their leader's own wife, the countess Sofya.

Valentin witnesses his employer's marital discord on his very first day. The passionate and outspoken countess (Helen Mirren, lovelier than ever in period attire) regards her husband's incarnation as a prophet as ridiculous and resents it because it has robbed her of his attention during the final years of their lives. The film presents just enough information for one to imagine Sofya's past, when she devoted herself to her husband's personal and artistic needs and bore him 13 children only to have him shut her out of a new existence brought on by … what? The film does not provide similar insight into Tolstoy's motivations, so one is left wondering whether he is in thrall to an end-of-life crisis (in which two revered novels feel like insufficient immortality), or manipulated dotage (in which Giamatti's character is ruling his enfeebled mind), or a deep spiritual yearning (which would need a miniseries to explain).

Whatever the cause of Tolstoy's desire to live like a celibate peasant, it is ravaging the affection he and his wife once shared (and still do in fits and spurts). Even as Valentin observes this situation with distressed amazement, he experiences something comparable. His first sexual and romantic encounter comes courtesy of a fellow Tolstoyan (Kerry Condon) who is a real free-thinker as opposed to a sheep looking for a shepherd like Valentin himself. He is soon caught between the lure of instinct and inspiration, between his sympathy for Sofya's earthly pain and his worship of Tolstoy as holy man.

The moving denouement of The Last Station allows Valentin to make a clear-cut choice, but not so Tolstoy and his heartbroken wife. The only undeniable conclusion from their contest is that decades of love and marriage — the tangible, everyday joining of two people — cannot be discarded no matter how antithetical it is to a man's ego, a spirit's pining, or the demands of any old ism.

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