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Posts: 1994
Sep 11 09 2:45 PM
Literary legends come to life in Michael Hoffman's "The Last Station," an evocation of Tolstoy's last months on earth, and Jane Campion's "Bright Star," which dramatizes the unconsummated passion between the Romantic poet John Keats and his shy young neighbor Fanny Brawne-she's played by Abbie Cornish. The latter film opens next week, so, here again, I'll confine myself to saying that Ms. Cornish makes the star of the title, and of Keats's lyric poem, truly luminous.
"The Last Station," on the other hand, doesn't have a distributor, or didn't have one near festival's end. That situation should be remedied forthwith. Far from some lofty denizen of Masterpiece Theater, the Tolstoy portrayed by Christopher Plummer is a richly human creation as well as a huge one, and Helen Mirren adds one more marvelous performance to her filmography as Sofya, Tolstoy's wife of 48 years. When Mr. Hoffman introduced the film, he felt it necessary to tell the audience that if anything struck them as funny they should feel free to laugh. Good advice, albeit gratuitous. The greatest pleasure of "The Last Station" is its combination of complexity and the antic verve that the director brought to the 1991 "Soapdish," a scintillating farce about soap operas.
She is Sofya in "The Last Station," a comic-dramatic account of Tolstoy's final months, in which she portrays the writer's wife of 48 years and the mother of his 13 children. Christopher Plummer is Tolstoy. James McAvoy plays his secretary who becomes the comic foil between two formidable opponents scheming for control of Tolstoy's estate: Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) and Mirren, whose Sofya proves her dedication by copying, by hand, War and Peace six times.
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