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Sep 28 09 12:37 AM
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There's war and very little peace in "The Last Station," a film by director/writer Michael Hoffman in an another Telluride Fiilm Festival world premiere. "The Last Station" is based on a book by Jay Parini about the last days of Count Leo Tolstoy, the writer who became a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist, turning his back on the privilege and opulence into which he was born. Christopher Plummer is Tolstoy and Helen Mirren is his wife Sofya, going at it like Kate and Petruchio, even after 48 years of marriage. James McAvoy is Tolstoy's devoted secretary Valentin Bulgakov. Paul Giamatti is a sleazoid zealot, Vladimir Chertkov, the leader of the utopian movement Tolstoy founded. The predator? Depends on whose side you are on, Sofya's or Chertkov's. With a relatively limited number of movies to choose from and now 10, not five, films with a shot at Best Picture, "The Last Station" could get the nod. For sure, Mirren, Plummer and McAvoy are contenders. http://www.tellurideinsid...nual-telluride-film-fest ival-review.html
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Sep 28 09 1:40 PM
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Oct 2 09 2:39 PM
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Oct 3 09 3:06 PM
Oct 22 09 9:42 AM
19 October, 2009 | By Lee Marshall
Dir/scr. Michael Hoffman. Germany-Russia. 2009. 111 mins.
Sterling performances by a cherry-picked Anglo-American cast and the hook of good story well told lift this conventionally-staged period piece about Tolstoy's tragicomic final months above the level of made-for-TV drama.
Heart and pathos carry The Last Station through a few hiccups, which include some jarringly broad comic touches
Hoffman's likeable biopic walks a nice edge between drama and comedy, in line with its subject matter - the love-hate struggle between a cantankerous old visionary surrounded by sycophants and his drama-queen wife who is determined to remind him of what he owes her and his family.
Sony Pictures Classics picked up this audience-pleasing title on the back of its buzzy Telluride debut, but a smooth ride in the North American arena is not guaranteed. However you spin it, a historical drama about the death of a Russian novelist is not exactly sexy - so the challenge will be to persuade target audiences (forty-plus, cultured) to take a punt. Once they do, they'll likely be hooked.
In its home markets, all the German and Russian talent here is on the technical side, and Russians in particular may not take kindly to seeing one of their national icons speaking in fruity Home Counties English - or dubbed Russian. Awards action may help, with Christopher Plummer's rich, humane Tolstoy more likely to be nominated than Helen Mirren's enjoyable but mannered Countess.
Based on Jay Parini's 1990 novel of the same name, the film charts Tolstoy's final months in 1910, when the writer of War and Peace was a media celebrity and an influential proponent of pacificsm and mystical Christian communism. Two camps contend for his favour: one is a coalition of worldly visionaries led by Tolstoy's scheming main disciple, Vladimir Chertkov (Giammatti); the other consists solely (at least in the film) of the writer's incurably jealous and histrionic wife of 48 years, the Countess Sonya (Mirren).
Sonya is convinced that Chertkov and his minions have turned her husband against her and plan to trick his family out of their rightful inheritance - including the rights to his literary works, which Tolstoy and his followers plan to bequeath to the Russian people. Moving between the two factions is Valentin (Mc Avoy), a keen, starstruck private secretary who is sent by Chertkov to keep an eye on the Countess.
McAvoy's tender take on Valentin commands audience sympathy, and his character's growth - losing his virginity to non-conformist communard Masha (Condon), resisting the anti-Countess remit he has been given, discovering that Tolstoy is hardly a latter-day saint - gives the story its dramatic backbone.
Heart and pathos carry The Last Station through a few hiccups, which include some jarringly broad comic touches (most notably in a bedchamber scene where Tolstoy and the Countess play amorous cock and hen) and a stagey use of extras to add romantic Russian colour.
Posts: 1390
Oct 22 09 9:12 PM
Oct 22 09 9:27 PM
Oct 22 09 11:29 PM
All this means that James McAvoy, who plays Tolstoy's new assistant in "Last Station" and was thought to be a more likely supporting choice, is getting bumped up to Best Actor probably because he does actually have more screen time than anyone else in the picture. Hmmmm.
Oct 24 09 4:25 AM
Oct 24 09 3:28 PM
Oscar-winning British actress Helen Mirren won best actress for her role as the wife of 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman's "The Last Station". http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iGQjGS3pvZi7x_uvAHMiCSJV_qwQ
Oct 27 09 10:52 PM
Posts: 1930
Nov 11 09 12:02 AM
Nov 19 09 1:27 AM
A film about the final days of Russian author Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina) may sound like a bore to the average moviegoer, and indeed, The Last Station is admittedly a very bookish, Merchant Ivory sort of film. But it's also utterly engrossing, superbly acted, and full of big ideas that ring very true. It was a joy to watch this film and I'd be surprised if it doesn't pick up a respectable amount of awards in the coming months.
The film boasts one of the best casts of the year and features incredible performances from Christopher "Captain Von Trapp" Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as his wife Sofya. James McAvoy also turns in one of his best performances, as the wide-eyed protégé/secretary of Tolstoy. Paul Giamatti is also quite good in a villainous role.
Based on the novel by Jay Parini, The Last Station is a film about the complex two-facedness of love; It's about passion and devotion and the tension between what we think and what we feel. It's about how love is often simultaneously our greatest source of joy and suffering, and how sometimes the love of an ideology can eclipse the love of another human being (to the detriment of all).
The film is about Tolstoy, a brilliant thinker and writer who at the start of the 20th century has a worldwide reputation and fan base. There is a growing "Tolstoyan" movement (a sort of utopian Christian anarchism) of which he is the figurehead. He is larger-than-life icon and celebrity, and yet he is also a husband and father. His wife (Mirren) wants him to love her first, and yet she fears that his "work," his ideas and legacy, are a higher priority for him. She loves him deeply and wants him for her own, but near the end of his life he has become "the world's." The film is about the pain of loving someone so much that you don't want to share them, and the problem of feeling closer to a conviction or ideal than an actual physical person or reality.
The Last Station tackles huge ideas that resonate deeply, but it does so in a way that never feels didactic. It's an entertaining film, first and foremost. And yet it's all so true. I think all of us deal with this tension between wanting to love and be loved but also wanting to make a difference in the world. Sometimes those desires are compatible and sometimes they are not. Relationships often fall victim in an individual's pursuit of significance. Does it have to be that way? I doubt it. But more often than not it's a truism of life: We can't have our cake and eat it too. There's only so much energy and will in any given life. Should it be focused on our love or our work? It's a deep and unsettling question, and The Last Station is one of the best films I've seen that asks it.
Nov 19 09 4:18 AM
Nov 21 09 9:05 AM
The House of Tolstoy, in his Winter "I FEEL that the attitude of people toward me is no longer an attitude toward a man but towards a celebrity," Leo Tolstoy wrote in his diary. "Either complete devotion and confidence, or, on the contrary, repudiation and hatred." Tolstoy's harried words, and the ripe melodramas they promise, come to life in "The Last Station," a new film about his turbulent final months before his death nearly a century ago. "The Last Station," which opens Dec. 4 for a weeklong Academy Awards-qualifying run before a wider release in January, presents a retiring Tolstoy eclipsed in his home by his inner circle's strong opinions and fierce emotions about what he has become. The film, which stars Christopher Plummer as the count in peasant dress and Helen Mirren as his no-holds-barred wife, Sofya, is filtered through the experiences of an awestruck new secretary, Bulgakov (James McAvoy). He's brought in by Tolstoy's scheming associate, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) - a proto-communist proponent of "Tolstoyan" asceticism who wants the living legend's works bequeathed to the Russian people. The resulting conflicts abound with philosophical and romantic declarations of purpose, and offer the naïve Bulgakov, and everyone else, competing notions on how to live, how to love and how to view the man at the center of it all. "It was like a wheel with Tolstoy at the middle, and everyone was living from whatever he reflected back to them," said Mr. Hoffman, the director of "Restoration" and "Soapdish," who adapted the screenplay from Jay Parini's historically based 1990 novel. "The obsession with him was extraordinary and in the end really exhausting." No one is perhaps more exhausted than Sofya Tolstoy. In Ms. Mirren's portrayal Sofya tries anything and everything to hold her beloved husband to his obligations to the family and to their shared past. It's a rendering that acknowledges recent views of Sofya as Tolstoy's partner and colleague in artistic endeavors (some of which have been documented in "Song Without Words," a 2007 National Geographic collection of her photographs and writings). But we also see her over-the-top exploits, like spying on Chertkov and Tolstoy by clambering onto a balcony. "Her emotion and her love for him, that was her only power base," Ms. Mirren said by telephone from London, where she is acting in a new film adaptation of Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock." "That is what is so fabulous about that character. She just constantly does outrageous things, full of real feeling." Mr. Hoffman recalled the deadpan inventory given by a crew member early in rehearsals: "The German costumer walked into the room and said to Helen, 'This is the dress you wear when you fall in from the balcony, and this is the dress you wear when you try to drown yourself in the pond, and this is the dress you wear when you try to make love to your husband, and this is the dress you wear when you break all the plates.' " Between the fiery Sofya and Tolstoy (whom she calls Lev) an identifiable portrait of marital tug of war emerges. Tolstoy, the more subdued half, rises to the bait occasionally but ultimately does as he wishes, for better or worse - including an ill-fated nighttime flight from the estate's imbroglios. For Mr. Plummer the role called for a grounded self-assurance rather than great-man theatrics. "The hardest thing is to play a genius, and even harder is to write a genius: you just say he's a genius, and good luck," Mr. Plummer said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he was shooting the film "Beginners," with Ewan McGregor. "I figure that people who have enormous intellect and have done so much with their lives don't have to push. So they are the most modest of men. They don't presume anything. He is what he is." Despite Tolstoy's nothing-to-prove bearing, his legacy in the film becomes an open question, which Chertkov is eager to answer. And as Chertkov maneuvers to paint Sofya as unstable and enlist her daughter Sasha (Anne-Marie Duff), "The Last Station" demonstrates another side to the intrigues: how history is a work constantly and consciously in progress. In scene after scene, someone present is noisily scribbling notes for posterity. It's a touch that in a way harks back to Mr. Parini's novel, which divided its chapters among six perspectives. An earlier screenplay, which Mr. Parini wrote in collaboration with Anthony Quinn, even employed a "Rashomon"-style structure. Mr. Hoffman's Chekhov-influenced screenplay streamlines the point of view but hews close to Mr. Parini's book, which in turn drew on the diaries of Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Sofya and others. (Mr. Parini, who has screenplays drawn from his books about Walter Benjamin and Robert Frost in the works, happily declares his intention never to write a "straight biography" again.) The film, shot in bucolic German locations, has its share of dramatically useful inventions, like Bulgakov's lover, Masha (played by Kerry Condon), and Sofya's presence at Tolstoy's deathbed. But Mr. Hoffman's telling has been positively received by, for one, the author's great-great-grandson Vladimir, director of Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate, and avid attendee at the film's festival showings. (Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film about a month after it screened at the Telluride Film Festival.) At least one more contented Russian can be found among the cast: Ms. Mirren - by descent. Her family on one side were aristocrats driven off in the 1917 revolution, and the world of the film reminded her of photographs of her grandparents' house. But any ancestral parallels with the movie's roiling relationship prove complicated. "My Russian father was actually rather quiet," Ms. Mirren recalled. "He was very like Tolstoy, gentle and quiet and philosophical. But my mother, very British through and through, was much more like Sofya."
"The Last Station," which opens Dec. 4 for a weeklong Academy Awards-qualifying run before a wider release in January, presents a retiring Tolstoy eclipsed in his home by his inner circle's strong opinions and fierce emotions about what he has become. The film, which stars Christopher Plummer as the count in peasant dress and Helen Mirren as his no-holds-barred wife, Sofya, is filtered through the experiences of an awestruck new secretary, Bulgakov (James McAvoy). He's brought in by Tolstoy's scheming associate, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) - a proto-communist proponent of "Tolstoyan" asceticism who wants the living legend's works bequeathed to the Russian people.
The resulting conflicts abound with philosophical and romantic declarations of purpose, and offer the naïve Bulgakov, and everyone else, competing notions on how to live, how to love and how to view the man at the center of it all.
"It was like a wheel with Tolstoy at the middle, and everyone was living from whatever he reflected back to them," said Mr. Hoffman, the director of "Restoration" and "Soapdish," who adapted the screenplay from Jay Parini's historically based 1990 novel. "The obsession with him was extraordinary and in the end really exhausting."
No one is perhaps more exhausted than Sofya Tolstoy. In Ms. Mirren's portrayal Sofya tries anything and everything to hold her beloved husband to his obligations to the family and to their shared past. It's a rendering that acknowledges recent views of Sofya as Tolstoy's partner and colleague in artistic endeavors (some of which have been documented in "Song Without Words," a 2007 National Geographic collection of her photographs and writings). But we also see her over-the-top exploits, like spying on Chertkov and Tolstoy by clambering onto a balcony.
"Her emotion and her love for him, that was her only power base," Ms. Mirren said by telephone from London, where she is acting in a new film adaptation of Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock." "That is what is so fabulous about that character. She just constantly does outrageous things, full of real feeling."
Mr. Hoffman recalled the deadpan inventory given by a crew member early in rehearsals: "The German costumer walked into the room and said to Helen, 'This is the dress you wear when you fall in from the balcony, and this is the dress you wear when you try to drown yourself in the pond, and this is the dress you wear when you try to make love to your husband, and this is the dress you wear when you break all the plates.' "
Between the fiery Sofya and Tolstoy (whom she calls Lev) an identifiable portrait of marital tug of war emerges. Tolstoy, the more subdued half, rises to the bait occasionally but ultimately does as he wishes, for better or worse - including an ill-fated nighttime flight from the estate's imbroglios. For Mr. Plummer the role called for a grounded self-assurance rather than great-man theatrics.
"The hardest thing is to play a genius, and even harder is to write a genius: you just say he's a genius, and good luck," Mr. Plummer said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he was shooting the film "Beginners," with Ewan McGregor. "I figure that people who have enormous intellect and have done so much with their lives don't have to push. So they are the most modest of men. They don't presume anything. He is what he is."
Despite Tolstoy's nothing-to-prove bearing, his legacy in the film becomes an open question, which Chertkov is eager to answer. And as Chertkov maneuvers to paint Sofya as unstable and enlist her daughter Sasha (Anne-Marie Duff), "The Last Station" demonstrates another side to the intrigues: how history is a work constantly and consciously in progress. In scene after scene, someone present is noisily scribbling notes for posterity.
It's a touch that in a way harks back to Mr. Parini's novel, which divided its chapters among six perspectives. An earlier screenplay, which Mr. Parini wrote in collaboration with Anthony Quinn, even employed a "Rashomon"-style structure. Mr. Hoffman's Chekhov-influenced screenplay streamlines the point of view but hews close to Mr. Parini's book, which in turn drew on the diaries of Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Sofya and others. (Mr. Parini, who has screenplays drawn from his books about Walter Benjamin and Robert Frost in the works, happily declares his intention never to write a "straight biography" again.)
The film, shot in bucolic German locations, has its share of dramatically useful inventions, like Bulgakov's lover, Masha (played by Kerry Condon), and Sofya's presence at Tolstoy's deathbed. But Mr. Hoffman's telling has been positively received by, for one, the author's great-great-grandson Vladimir, director of Yasnaya Polyana, the family estate, and avid attendee at the film's festival showings. (Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film about a month after it screened at the Telluride Film Festival.)
At least one more contented Russian can be found among the cast: Ms. Mirren - by descent. Her family on one side were aristocrats driven off in the 1917 revolution, and the world of the film reminded her of photographs of her grandparents' house. But any ancestral parallels with the movie's roiling relationship prove complicated.
"My Russian father was actually rather quiet," Ms. Mirren recalled. "He was very like Tolstoy, gentle and quiet and philosophical. But my mother, very British through and through, was much more like Sofya."
Nov 27 09 6:05 AM
The Last Station: Down for the Count Film opens Jan. 15: James McAvoy, Helen Mirren, and Christopher Plummer offer a grand display of acting fireworks in The Last Station, writer-director Michael Hoffman's juicy account of the fraught final year of Count Leo Tolstoy's life. The tale depicts a tug of war over Tolstoy's legacy-a clash between ideals and reality, the flesh and the spirit. The great novelist (Plummer), in thrall to his idealistic philosophy, has renounced his title, his property, eating meat, and sex, and is about to sign away the rights to his novels to "the Russian people"-to the horror of his wife, Sofya (Mirren). She's determined to keep him from giving away his family's inheritance, while the fanatical head of the Tolstoy movement, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), is dead set on getting Tolstoy to sign. Caught in the middle is young Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy), Tolstoy's secretary, whom both Sofya and Chertkov try to inveigle to their cause. It's easy to see whose side Hoffman is on: Sofya may be hysterical and manipulative, but on this seriocomedic battlefield her lust for life (and property) trumps Chertkov's rigid ideology. The role lets Mirren unleash her inner diva: Sofya's love-hate combat with her husband plays like "Who's Afraid of Leo Tolstoy?" McAvoy rings virtuoso variations on idol worship and naiveté, and his excitement when he falls in love for the first time with the free-thinking communard Masha (Kerry Condon) is hilarious and touching. The Last Station slides gracefully between comedy and pathos (it aims for tragedy, but doesn't quite get there). Both sides are captured in Plummer's sly, volcanic portrait of an icon far less Tolstoyan than his followers. Was this wildly contradictory genius really this lovably irascible? Perhaps not-but in movie terms, he sure is fun to be around.
Dec 2 09 8:32 AM
The Last Station Running time 112 minutes Written and directed by Michael Hoffman Starring James McAvoy, Christopher Plummer, Paul Giamatti, Helen Mirren
Let the drums roll. The arrival of a movie with as much intelligence and artistry as The Last Station should also be accompanied by the sound of trumpets. For the legions of movie lovers who lament the passing of great filmmaking, don't give up yet. This one is for you.
A period costume biopic about the last days of the magnificent Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy may not seem like box office gold in the age of aliens and teenage vampires, but the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina is still considered one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and his story is filled with the turbulence and drama that makes for epic grandeur; attention must be paid. With lush landscapes, gorgeous clothes and estates and fabulous acting by a distinguished cast headed by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, this film has so much to savor and applaud that I scarcely know where to begin. Yet The Last Station is never arch, stuffy, highbrow or remote. It never keeps the audience at a distance. There's no question that a historical drama about the death of a Russian icon will be a hard sell. But, written and directed with skill, sensitivity and humor by Michael Hoffman, it is as entertaining as it is literate. I find it rapturous and perfect.
The year is 1910, Russia is feverish with visionary Communists, the smell of revolution is in the air and everyone keeps a diary. (The movie is based on the 1990 novel by Jay Parini, which, in turn, was based on the diaries of all the characters involved.) Tolstoy (Mr. Plummer), who heads a pacifist movement that preaches passive resistance, truth, freedom and sexual abstinence, and eschews Russian royalty, free thinking, organized religion, the accumulation of wealth, the owning of private property and eating anything but vegetables, is caught in a tug of war between a scheming disciple, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), a rabid Trotskyite who persuades him to leave all of his royalties to the Russian people, and his wife of nearly 50 years, the Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), a jealous, overripe and hysterical drama queen who demands that he will his estate to his family for posterity. She loves her husband, but does not worship him as a spiritual prophet of God. In fact, she knows his character flaws so well that she cannot bear any more talk of hero worship, or giving away their land to the peasants. She wants to protect the works of Tolstoy for her children's inheritance and considers Chertkov a phony sycophant and an evil influence with political ambitions of his own. "If I had a wife like you, I would have blown my brains out-or gone to America!" yells Mr. Giamatti in a clownish outburst of the kind of eye-rolling overacting that has become his trademark.
Caught in the middle is Tolstoy's new secretary, Valentin (James McAvoy, from Atonement and The Last King of Scotland), a dedicated follower of Tolstoy's doctrine who
The Last Station brims with revelations about the human lives and the culture the Russians sacrificed in the name of Communist idealism. It is full of ideas, clearly detailed and vividly acted by an exemplary cast. Mr. McAvoy grows sympathetically from a tender, star-struck Valentin, deployed to spy on the countess but winning her confidence and friendship, to a man of the world,
The Last Station opens this week for a seven-day trial run to qualify for Oscars, then returns on a regular basis in January. Do not wait. Experience the adrenalin rush early. This movie is passionate, profound and unforgettable.
Dec 5 09 6:48 PM
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