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It's not easy being the wife of a cultural icon -- even worse, of a saint -- as Countess Sofia Andreyevna Tolstoy discovered during the most celebrated Family Feud and media event of the turn of the (19th into the 20th) century. For 48 years, she had been the devoted wife, lover, muse and secretary of the great Lev Nikolayevich, copying out his 2,000-page "War and Peace" manuscript six times by hand! Ah, for Xerox ...
She'll be spending much of his last year -- and of Michael Hoffman's excellent film, "The Last Station" -- making a nuisance of herself, fighting for access to him while his hostile handlers fight just as hard to keep them apart.
It's exactly a century ago in 1910 at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's ancestral home. The great writer has undergone a religious -- or sacrilegious -- conversion, renouncing his nobility, his estate and his family for poverty, vegetarianism and celibacy. And after she has born him 13 children! Fierce love and devotion conflict with estrangement and their "totally opposite ideas of the meaning and purpose of existence."
- Starring: Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, James McAvoy.
- Rating: R for some sexuality and brief nudity.
- Web site: www.sonyclassics.com/thelaststation/
Sonya (Helen Mirren) can't forsake the materialism that St. Leo (Christopher Plummer) now renounces. She cannot understand his newfound fervor against church and private property in favor of pacifism, civil disobedience and the Tolstoyan commune movement now spreading throughout Russia.
She certainly can't understand her husband's trust in chief disciple Vladimir Chertkov, whom she despises for not-so-secretly pushing Tolstoy to leave the rights to his iconic novels to the Russian people instead of his family. And she'll be using all the cunning she can muster -- which is plenty, including intimations of homosexuality -- to fight Chertkov for what she feels is hers.
"You fat little catamite!" she charges him in one especially heated encounter.
"Oh, this is unbearable," moans Tolstoy. "Can I not have some peace? You don't need a husband, you need a Greek chorus!"
The worse her behavior, the easier for Chertkov to convince Tolstoy she's a threat to his legacy. The struggle rages to the backwater railroad town of Astapovo -- literally and figuratively the end of the line, and of their tumultuous life together.
Superb portrayals by Ms. Mirren and Mr. Plummer have rightfully garnered them a pair of Oscar and Golden Globe nominations apiece. Most spectacular is that of Dame Helen (recently and ironically elevated/demoted to Dame from "The Queen"). She outdoes her QE2 performance here as Tolstoy's model for Anna Karenina: At any point, we expect her to throw herself under some train or another. Her virago's voice ranges from the heights to the depths while, even in high theatrical dudgeon, she's slyly aware of the photo-ops and absurdist comedy in her predicament.
Tolstoy's running away from home at age 82 was a big media event. Proto-paparazzi and pious priests hover around him like the human carrion birds. Not least of the film's virtues is its treasure trove of Tolstoy film-archival footage, employed especially well at the end.
Mr. Plummer, for his part, resembles John Huston in his delectable, dead-ringer depiction of Tolstoy as ribald-old-man. James McAvoy is excellent as Tolstoy's fresh young private secretary -- so emotionally eager to be there, so virginal, and so nervous with his sneezing attacks. Mr. McAvoy is perfectly paired with liberated love interest Masha (Kerry Condon) -- they have a great, sexy deflowering scene! Meanwhile, Mr. McAvoy's real-life wife, Anne-Marie Duff, does a fine job as Tolstoy's ice-cold daughter Sasha -- a harbinger of the Bolshevik commissars coming imperial Russia's way in the not-too-distant future. (Ms. Duff played Margot Fonteyn and John Lennon's mother in the recent BBC productions "Margot" and "Nowhere Boy.")
Paul Giamatti is wonderful as the conniving, sycophantic Chertkov, twirling his villainously waxed mustache and ordering Mr. McAvoy to keep a diary of everything the Countess says. Indeed, everybody here is keeping a diary on everybody else, writing down Tolstoy's every word and noting his every movement, including bowel.
The artful direction of Mr. Hoffman ("Soapdish," "Some Girls," "Midsummer Night's Dream") is complemented by Sebastian Edschmid's gorgeous photography -- white birches accessorizing the snow-covered landscapes and mustard-color manors. Terrific music direction by Sergei Yevtushenko matches Puccini's "Un bel die" from Mme. Butterfly to the operatic story.
Mr. Hoffman's screenplay is based on Jay Parini's 1990 novel (not biography) of Tolstoy's final year. Its multiple points of view -- from everyone around Tolstoy, but not Tolstoy himself -- strongly remind me of a predecessor work by Leon Katz, the great playwright and teacher whose "A Death at Astapovo" (later renamed "Sonya") premiered here in Pittsburgh back in 1979. (See story below.)
If the version at hand lacks full, satisfying depth, it's an undeniably, hugely entertaining actors' romp full of meaty roles manifested to the max. The two monster-performers duke it out with Shakespearean passion in fabulous arguments around the samovar that will make you want to run right out and buy one.
"The Last Station" is a riveting, Chekhovian tragicomedy of marriage. Film and family feud alike move through bipolar exhilaration and mournful modulation to, finally, compassion. Ms. Mirren's brilliant balancing act mirrors Sonya's: desired muse or ruinous distraction on a final mission of mercy or of personal greed?
You be the judge, but the bio-signs point strongly to both.
Opens today at the Manor in Squirrel Hill.
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