The Last Station

The Last Station – A German-Russian production, starring British and American actors, The Last Station has a rich, civilized Masterpiece Theater patina. (This 2011 picture was directed by Michael Hoffmann, shot in birch forests and pastures near Leipzig, and stars Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy, Helen Mirren as his long-suffering wife, Sofia, and Paul Giamatta as Chertkov, Tolstoy’s disciple who seeks to transfer the copyright to Tolstoy’s writings to “the Russian people”, thus disenfranchising Sofia and her children). The material is very rich and complex and, probably, it would require a director on the order of Sokhurov or Michael Haneke to adequately explore the various subjects intrinsic to the film. Tolstoy has become the center of a cult, both relating to his utopian ideas as well as a cult of personality – journalists and cameramen swarm the margins of the film, recording Tolstoy’s every movement and those conspiring to seize his literary empire record their machinations in precise detail in diaries that are frequently stolen or consulted as the film progresses. Tolstoy’s utopian idealism is at odds with his grandiosity and narcissism. Sofia is naked mercantile in her concerns. Chertkov, a character whose part is severely underwritten, seems power-hungry and manipulative. Ultimately, Tolstoy flees the struggle over his legacy, deserting his wife and dying in a provincial train station surrounded by the pitiless glare of publicity. The film celebrates Tolstoy’s love of life but is completely inadequate to capture the man’s lifelong obsessive concern with death. The darkness around Tolstoy emanates from his obsession with death as the guarantor of meaning in life and his compulsive attempts to avoid death, or, at least, understand its significance. Like most PBS shows, The Last Station is relentlessly positive; it has a happy ending of a sort, an implied reconciliation between Tolstoy and his wife and the film is sentimental, even a bit kitschy in its middle-brow (and mostly pleasant) way. The grandeur and titanic darkness associated with Tolstoy is lost – and, probably, couldn’t be portrayed in any event. The film has a mildly involving double-plot – Tolstoy’s struggles are mirrored by a young man’s first love affair with one of the women at the Tolstoyan compound near Yasnaya Polyana. This plot is used to create a false happy ending – the reunion of the young lovers – that has nothing to do with the central action in the film. (The script is extremely schematic – the young man is used as an “outsider” to introduce the viewers to the milieu of the parties competing for Tolstoy’s legacy). The film looks great, is emotionally gripping, and has good acting – Mirren is particularly fine – but it’s minor and resolutely unambitious.