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Directed by Michael Hoffman
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The Last
Station I
see dead people... I see Leo Tolstoy in his grave. I see Leo turning slowly from side to
side. I see him starting to spin
in his grave, faster and faster until he bursts out and strangles Michael
Hoffman, the man who wrote and directed “The Last Station,” a
turgid and inert film about the last year of Tolstoy’s life... Whooo! That
felt good; after all, I’m entitled to a little fantasy now and then,
but let’s not forget that Leo Tolstoy, the man who wrote a couple of
the greatest novels of all time, plus some extraordinary short stories,
deserves something a little better than a movie called “The Last
Station.” “The
Last Station” is no doubt accurate in its essentials, in the same way
that Cliff’s notes are.:
When Tolstoy was old and living on his utopian farm, he was the
more-or-less willing host to a man named Chertkov
(played by Paul Giamatti in the film) who was such
an acolyte of Tolstoy’s vision of the world that he wormed
himself into his inner circle with the idea that Tolstoy should write a new
will leaving his entire estate and the proceeds of his novels to something
called ‘the Russian people’ rather than to his wife and his 13
children, thereby cutting them off from any royalties they might have
collected and leaving them penniless.. Tolstoy
– played here by the Canadian actor Christopher Plummer – has
already lost sight of his wife and family, although Helen Mirren,
who plays Sofia, his wife, tries in vain to rekindle some of his earlier
ardor for her. But the movie
doesn’t really follow them so much as it follows a young, virginal
secretary, Valentin (played by James McAvoy) whom Chertkov hires to
be a spy within the family and report back to him just what’s happening
between Tolstoy and his wife. Chertkov has been exiled by Sofia and forbidden to come
to the Tolstoy farm. So
all the elements are in place, but what is wrong with the film? The dialogue is mundane, the
shots and editing are uninteresting, the tensions and conflicts are all laid
out for us in advance, there are no moments when little or nothing is
happening, as they might in life, but we see only the moments of great
conflict, and none of the people, with one exception, are interesting. And no, it’s not Leo Tolstoy but
his wife Sofia, who engages our interest even though we know she is to lose
her battle for her husband. So
imagine making a film about the greatest novelist in history and making it so
dull that we squirm in our seats.
That’s what “The Last Station” is, when it could
have been a triumph. |
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