The Last Station (2009)

(This is a mini-review of a movie I watched months ago.)

The entire time I was watching THE LAST STATION, I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to be watching the film's three stars, Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and James McAvoy, perform this script on a Broadway stage. It's my biggest criticism of the film, I suppose, that it didn't feel like it needed to BE a film. But don't mistake that comment as one that indicates any kind of lack of appreciation or enjoyment.

The enjoyment, then, is in the performances. While director Michael Hoffman does little but glide across a Hallmark card-perfect European countryside landscape, he deserves credit for staying out of the way of three fantastic actors who expertly tell the story of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (Plummer), his devoted but bull-headed wife Sofya (Mirren), and one of his devoted followers (McAvoy), who is given a dream opportunity to meet with Tolstoy and work on his estate in his final years and develop his own beliefs in Tolstoy's political and social philosophies, all of which drive Sofya crazy. (On a side note, Hoffman also directed one of my favorite guilty-pleasure films of all-time, "Soapdish," which is another example of picking great actors and getting out of their way.)

The story here is one of a marriage that has scene it all and holds itself together in deference to time despite some significant foundational cracks. Sofya is irritated by the devotion of others to her husband's ideals and specifically belligerent toward Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti, as good as ever), who she feels is fashioning himself to be the one who will control Tolstoy's estate after he has passed on. One specific sticking point in the story is over the rights to his great novels.

While THE LAST STATION looks at times like a Merchant/Ivory production, there's little here to suggest that it works any better as a film than it could have worked as a play. Its limited movement and thoughtful discussions perhaps lend this story more to the stage than the screen. And yet, with performances like these, you watch in whatever format you have the opportunity to watch!

3.0 out of 4