The Last Station
starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, James McAvoy and Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Michael Hoffman
directed by Michael Hoffman
Rating: ♦♦♦♦♦
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910) was a worldwide literary icon in his own lifetime. It was global news when he died. The circumstances of his death are odd. At age 82 he fled his family and his large rural estate and died of pneumonia at the Astapovo train station - or, rather, in the home of the local station master. The town in western Russia was founded in 1890. Today it is home to about 10,000 people. I thought Astapovo was in eastern Siberia, or something, at the end of the train line furthest removed from St. Petersburg and Moscow. That’s the image brewed by the idea of the “last station.” I was wrong.
Based on the 1990 biographical novel The Last Station by Jay Parini, the film chronicles the final months of Tolstoy’s life. The film stars Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy, Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya, Paul Giamati as his disciple Vladimir Chertkov, and James McAvoy as Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov, a private secretary hired by Chertkov to spy quietly on the Tolstoy household. The film is about the battle between Sofya and Chertkov for control of Tolstoy’s legacy and the copyright of his works. Chertkov is portrayed as a scheming, evil Tolstoy zealot who successfully robs the Tolstoy family of the Count’s copyrights through a secretly-negotiated second will. The real life Vladinir Chertkov (1854-1936) died in Moscow spending decades editing Tolstoy’s complete works, which came to about ninety printed volumes. Countess Sofya managed to regain her husband’s copyrights from a Bolshevik revolutionary court before her death in 1919.
In the late-1800s Tolstoy experienced some kind of moral and spiritual awakening, and through his writing and his retreat from the world to his rural estate he advocated a kind of Christian utopianism called “Tolstoyism” promulgated by followers like Chertkov, although not by Tolstoy himself. Vladimir Chertkov was part founder of a Christian anarchist group formed to spread Tolstoy’s religious ideas. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Christian anarchism!
Count Leo came to oppose private property, the institution of marriage, and advocated celibacy. Not surprisingly, Chertkov were more zealous than Tolstoy himself who was rife with contradictions. Leo Tolstoy was not, strictly speaking, a Tolstoyan. Although he advocated poverty, he maintained a privileged life on his estate until almost the very end of his life. Conflict with his family - especially his wife - rose from the his desire to divest himself of all worldly property. Sofya’s position is that it would leave his (large) family unprovided for. In the movie, Christopher Plummer explains that income from the estate would continue to provide for the family while income from his copyrights would provide for his Tolstoyan movement. I’m not sure if that’s true, or how true it is, and I’m also not sure how that corresponds to the historical reality, but that’s how it’s (briefly) addressed in the film, anyway.
The film is visually interesting. It features one of the things I adore about historical stories - a crystal clear interior soundtrack, almost like a documentary. I mean, the sounds of people walking on wooden floors, of grit under their heels, of doors and windows opening and closing, of fabric and paper rustling. It’s fantastic! It made turn-of-the-century Russia seem so real, inhabited by real people. Otherwise, my impressions of pre-revolutionary Russian have never been very complimentary - a slow, antiquated, backwards and under-developed society led by an idiot Tsar controlled by a religiously zealous wife dominated by a corrupt, psychopathic monk all of which invited revolution and cultivated defeat in war with Germany seventeen years later.
The film is filled with papers. Papers everywhere. As a writer, writing, copying, editing and manipulating manuscripts was Tolstoy’s business. But in addition, Sofya herself, not only her husband’s editor and copyist, was a renowned diarist. No doubt about it, the Tolstoy family was very dysfunctional. The husband and wife communicated with each other largely through letters and diaries. Rather than discuss things face-to-face with his wife, or with her husband, each would write diaries for the other to read. As a private secretary, one of Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov’s jobs was to make a transcript of his time with the great man. That meant constant note-taking like a stenographer, and later revision. Not only Bulgakov, but also Tolstoy’s doctor is portrayed taking notes all the time. Notes, notes, notes! Until finally Helen Mirren explodes at everyone around her to stop writing everything down! I want to say that this kind of literacy, or literariness, is quite alien to modern life. But then I wonder if we are not re-approaching it with modern social media where so many people document everything - even the incredibly mundane - about their lives. But now we are doing it with photographs accompanied by captions, not by long, flowing prose.
I think it’s wonderful that Tolstoy lived at a time when we were able to capture motion picture images of him. And phonographic recordings of his voice. (We have motion pictures of Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Queen Victoria, too. Isn’t that incredible?)
There was a lot of tension between Sofya and Chertkov. Open shouting matches until Paul Giamatti (one of my favorite actors) exclaims,
“If I had a wife like you I would have blown my brains out! Or, gone to America!”
That’s my favorite line.