A Hero, From the Inside

A wide-eyed novice is invited into the master’s inner sanctum to join his acolytes. At first, both dazzled and intimidated, the newcomer, a true believer, soon discovers life  on the inside is just like life on the outside: filled with self-interested strivers, slackers, and cynics.

  Even the master himself doesn’t practice what he preaches.

   And power struggles threaten to bring down the whole enterprise.

   It’s an old story, often told, and just because “The Last Stationâ€� is true, more or less, and about a fascinating historical and literary figure, doesn’t make it a particularly interesting movie. In fact, the story of the novice is by far the least interesting part of the film but takes up way too much time.

   The master is Leo Tolstoy (played by Christopher Plummer), who preached communal living, celibacy, vegetarianism and the renunciation of personal wealth. The novice is young Valentin Bulgokov (James McAvoy), newly hired as Tolstoy’s personal secretary. And the power struggle, over the ailing and aged Tolstoy’s will, is between Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), the leading “Tolstoyan,â€� who is fighting to have the rights to Tolstoy’s work left to the people so the royalties can help the common man, and Tolstoy’s wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), who wants to hold onto the wealth and privilege she has become accustomed to, for herself and her children.

   The script, by Michael Hoffman (who also directed) is clumsy in spots — the first 20 minutes of exposition are particularly painful.   To leaven the political infighting that is the heart of the story, the filmmakers sandwich in a conventional romance between Valentin and a pretty young worker on the communal camp where Tolstoy’s followers haul water, chop wood, and live out the ideals of love as preached in the Sermon on the Mount. (Tolstoy himself lives far from the camp, in his luxurious family estate, attended by white-gloved servants.) Lovely Masha (Kerry Condon) seduces Valentin, and once he realizes that his idol in no way disapproves of pleasures of the flesh, Valentin eagerly discards his vows of celibacy.

   More interesting than a few bare-chested bedroom scenes would have been developing the character of Chertkov — he is shown as a one-dimenionsional schemer, whose insistence on wresting the rights to Tolstoy’s work away from Sofya seems more self-serving than the act of a true believer.

   Giamatti mostly reins in his bug-eyed excesses and lets his mustache do the acting; even firing at half-power, the others have to ramp up their scenery-eating tendencies just to match him. McAvoy’s Valentin stutters, stumbles, sneezes, and widens his puppy-dog eyes to show nervousness (or lust). Fortunately, his performance settles down as the character begins to understand the lines that have been drawn and he establishes his own allegiances. 

   Plummer is almost invisible behind a gigantic beard, but he’s convincing as a man torn asunder by the conflict between love and loyalty for his wife, and his equally powerful repugnance at her manipulations, and at the dishonest life he leads.

   But the film belongs to Helen Mirren —  Countess Sofya could have been no more than a manipulative, self-dramatizing harridan, but Mirren reveals her tenderness, sexiness and genuine affection for her husband of 48 years. She throws screaming tantrums, fakes heart attacks and suicide attempts, and both bullies and seduces her husband into promising he won’t change his will.

   Unable to refuse or deny her to her face, he finally sneaks away from his home in the middle of the night.

   The title of the film (also the title of the novel by Jay Parini upon which the movie is based) refers to the Astapovo train station, where Tolstoy ends up, gravely ill, to live out his last days ensconsed in the stationmaster’s house, while the 1910 equivalent of paparazzi camp outside waiting for updates on his health. Or demise.

   The events of Tolstoy’s life and death are near operatic, but the film Hoffman has made is, as Tolstoy wrote of his character in “The Life of Ivan Ilyich,â€�  “most ordinary and most simple and therefore most terrible.â€�