Fridae

There are middling artists who would love nothing more than to have a horde of adoring acolytes hanging on to their every word, being thankful for each infinitesimal iota of wisdom they utter. For these artists, there is no better self-validation than the size or the ardency of their hangers-on and sycophants, no better shot at immortality than to have a brand of political activism or moral doctrine named after them. And for these artists, there is no better comeuppance than to have the sycophants fully take over their cult of personality.

You would think that Count Leo Tolstoy (yes, the War and Peace, Anna Karenina guy) should have known better, but the fact is even the greatest Russian writer of them all had his weaknesses. In the final decade of his life, the great Tolstoy, inspired by St Augustine and the ascetic Christian tradition, decided to abandon his novel writing to champion his own brand of Christian philosophy.

The blessing and curse of his talent, reputation, and the rightness of his philosophy (even Gandhi was an admirer!) attracted countless hangers-on, sycophants, and schemers to his fortune, to the displeasure of his wife, the Countess Sofya, and forms the basis of the movie. As you can imagine, such a situation can be played for laughs, as a battle of wits, as well as high drama – which Michael Hoffman’s screenplay does all at once, with beautiful cinematography reminiscent of a Merchant-Ivory production. For a movie with such diverse facets, the strong performances of Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and Paul Giamatti provide the glue that holds everything together.

James McAvoy plays the naïf newcomer who is thrown into the tempestuous affairs of the Tolstoy family, and it is through his eyes that we view the high stakes match between Giamatti as chief acolyte and Helen Mirren as the infuriatingly devoted wife. But who is the schemer and who is Tolstoy’s salvation? The icing on the cake is that it’s also a comedy of manners where all sides in the conflict (even Tolstoy himself!) receive their fair share of potshots.

Most of all, though, The Last Station is a touching love story about two old people who love each other despite having completely incompatible moral, religious, and ideological outlooks, having at least one major quarrel a day, and threatening to declare each other mentally incompetent.