THE LAST STATION

I spent a significant chunk of my senior year of high school reading Anna Karenina cover to cover and then researching the life of Leo Tolstoy.  I learned a lot of crazy trivia about the man, including the fact that he once ran away from home (quite late in life) and that he died in a train station, but most of the details have faded from my memory.  A Tolstoy biopic starring my beloved Christopher Plummer seemed like a great way to brush up on the facts.

 

Though ostensibly interesting, The Last Station doesn't exactly provide a traditional three act structure and story arc.  It is, as the title implies, simply a look at the final days of Tolstoy's life, a particular period of weirdness where he was roughly as famous as Justin Bieber and as eccentric as Morrissey.  It was not uncommon to find the equivalent of paparazzi snapping photographs on his front lawn, and there were plenty of fans and hangers-on trying to get a piece of the Tolstoy pie.  Somehow, at this late hour, Leo Tolstoy seemed to lose his identity.

 

It was a fact not lost on his devoted wife, Sofya (played brilliantly by Helen Mirren).  Though prone to fits of drama, Sofya is just about the only person in Tolstoy's world who sees things as they are.  The people who call themselves Tolstoyans and attempt to live life according to his tenets are little more than starstruck superfans, and Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) isn't only interested in preserving Tolstoy's legacy: he's pressuring old Leo to change his will and leave nothing to his family.  Clearly a man who would do that does not have entirely pure intentions.  

 

Time and time again, Sofya is dismissed as paranoid, possessive, and hysterical, but why shouldn't she be?  Her attempts to communicate logically are completely ignored - how else is she supposed to make herself heard?  Sometimes a girl just has to run across the front lawn in her nightie, walk down the dock, and roll into the lake.  You can't really call it a suicide attempt, but it certainly is an attention-getter.

 

For his part, Tolstoy simply seems lost.  He's committed to a system of beliefs he cannot actually practice (fully admitting that he may be the worst Tolstoyan he knows), and he can't quite resist the undying sycophantic love coming from his groupies.  Basically he can't trust himself and doesn't realize that he can't trust the people around him.  Truly only Sofya has his best interest at heart, and she's the one being shut out of his life.  The whole situation is exceedingly sad.

 

Though the movie can be a bit slow and anticlimactic at times, it does succeed as a character study of Tolstoy and his wife, and Plummer and Mirren are excellent in their respective roles.  As for the running away from home and dying in the train station I remembered?  Tolstoy was taken to a train station to convalesce during his last days, his wife was prevented from seeing him until the very end, and a full-on media circus waited outside.  Not quite what I imagined, but unusual (and heart-wrenching) to say the least.