The Last Station

Deb 7 Me 8

It seems like most biopics focus on people that are incredibly destructive or self-destructive. This movie is about Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Leo for short, who wrote a couple famous books, Anna Karenina and War and Peace. No small feat, but his The Kingdom of God is Within You, started an entire movement of passive resistance that got the Gandhi ball rolling. Leo was a much better balanced guy than most of these fictionalized biographies feature, but his world was filled with conflicts and contradictions.

That seems to be what the film is about. It’s fun to see what movies are about. Sometimes you think it’s one thing and then it turns out to be another. Sometimes it’s hard to pry your pre-conceived notions out of your head and sometimes you were right in the first place.

Watching this movie was just a pleasure to sit back and see where it takes you. I didn’t have any real references to Tolstoy and didn’t know where it was going at any particular time. Sometimes you know just a little about the subject and you’re waiting the whole time, “this is where he gets hit by lightning or where the whale gobbles him up”. No such expectations here and the filmmaker guides you through the chronology seamlessly.

It’s a smart film and cast well. Christopher Plummer, a famous name, played Leo. He must do a lot of theater because the good movies he’s been in you can count on your hand. Helen Mirren played the wife and she was pretty great, another theater person I guess. You have to have young people in there too so they got James MacAvoy and some other young thing as his love interest. MacAvoy does a good job, maybe overplays his zeal a few times, but I’m constantly distracted by his remarkable similarity to an old friend, Broc Smith. I keep thinking, “that’s not what Broc would do…” (obviously my own problem and not that of the actor). If I have any criticism it might be that most of the people are from theater where exaggeration is a necessary part of getting your point across, film rewards subtlety.

It was a pretty straightforward film, and I enjoyed sitting there for it’s just under two hour running time. The credits were cool too; they rolled archival film of the old man that was interesting to see. I don’t know if it’s accurate to any degree, but it’s enjoyable.