Tolstoy goes to Hollywood

Michael Hoffman's "The Last Station" is a campy, over-the-top comic melodrama, which certainly isn't what you'd expect from a film about Leo Tolstoy's last years. I suppose this might bother those familiar with Tolstoy's work; what I know of him comes mainly from that "Seinfeld" episode in which the true title of "War and Peace" is revealed to be "War: What Is It Good For?" In any case, this particular philistine had a rather good time at the movies, and, as long as you don't expect high intellectualism in your films about literary giants, I suspect that you might as well.

The plot of "The Last Station" centers on the struggle between Tolstoy's wife Sofya (Helen Mirren) and Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) to control the work of Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) after his death. Sofya wants to sell the work to a publisher and rake in money for the estate to support the Tolstoy family, while Chertkov wants Tolstoy's novels and later political writings to be bequeathed to the Russian people. Caught in the middle of the struggle is Tolstoy's new secretary (James McAvoy), who is also struggling to choose between strictly following the guidelines laid out by Tolstoy's political philosophy (read: not having sex) and getting with a lovely fellow traveler (Kerry Condon).

This may sound like the setup for an intellectual battle, but most of the movie plays like farce, primarily because the actors don't so much chew the scenery as they do unhinge their jaws and swallow the scenery whole like a python. McAvoy has a wonderful bit of physical comedy where he involuntarily lets out a strange implosion of a sneeze every time he gets nervous, which the director has fun using as a comic exclamation point. Plummer's Tolstoy is more a lusty lover than a public intellectual, bellowing out loud gales of laughter and engaging in ribald flirtations with his wife. Giamatti, as the ostensible villain of the piece, spends much of his screen time stroking and waxing his mustache.

And then we get to Helen Mirren. One of the world's great actresses, Mirren has proven to be capable of uncommon subtlety and nuance, but her role here is campy, overblown excess of the most entertaining sort. After she gets into a fight with Tolstoy over dinner, for example, Mirren jumps up and smashes not one, but three dishes before feigning a heart attack and dropping to the floor. Later, when Tolstoy and Chertkov are holding a private meeting, Mirren climbs out her bedroom window to the neighboring balcony and then promptly falls through the doorway, tearing down curtains and screaming accusations. To her immense credit, Mirren maintains the audience's sympathy for her character even as the script continually attempts to embarrass her in new ways.

There's reason enough to see the film for all the ranting and raving alone, which compensates for some of the film's more egregious failings. Hoffman's movie is thoroughly tilted toward Sofya's side of the struggle for Tolstoy's work, and the film depicts ideology as the tool used by evil schemers like Chertkov to tear apart happy couples. Not only is this is a strange attitude to take toward ideology, given that Tolstoy's political writings ended up inspiring Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., but the film is too lazy to even provide a thorough explanation of what that ideology is, let alone an argument in favor of it. Hoffman gives the non-sexual aspects of Tolstoy's philosophy maybe a line or two of dialogue total before focusing on its restrictive view of sex; he comes across like a dim student searching the index of a philosophy textbook for dirty words.

But, of course, we're not here for heavy thinking - we're here to see acting titans act as hard as they can. Just don't be under any illusion that because it plays the art houses, "The Last Station" is any more sophisticated than, say, "2012." The hurricanes here just happen to made of emotion instead of, uh, water.

3 paws

Pros: Absurdly hammy performances