LAST STATION (2009) **1/2 Christopher Plummer as the great quasi-communist novelist Leo Tolstoy, and Helen Mirren as his beloved capitalist countess of a wife, battling over royalties…you'd figure that they're going to be on to something. And they are, just not quite to the magnitude that you'd hoped. Now I don't know a enough about…well, Tolstoy to start with, and these events in particular…which have no doubt been rewritten by enough historians that no one else does either, much…but it does have a feeling of their gentle manipulation or maybe they're not really sure what happened and's going on either. In any event it settles for being a gentle celebration of Tolstoy's ideals, and a sympathetic endorsement of their critique by his wife. In any event it strikes me as being not quite true: it seems to be that Countess Tolstoy was either a greedy grubbing self-centered aristocrat (much of which is in evidence, here)…why couldn't she live off the proceeds of their huge estate?... or the Paul Giamatti character was a con man (suggested here, but without evidence) who was going to swindle the proceeds for his own personal gain (somewhat refuted by the historical record). Whatever, Helen's performance is sympathetic and genuine, if not necessarily true; impassioned and generally unimpressed in the manner of a discarded assistant. Plummer hits you hard right away-he looks like Tolstoy, I've seen photos-but ultimately fails to attain the complexity of character that would seem necessary…but maybe wasn't, if that's really all Tolstoy had left in his closing days and hours, mixed feelings been over-ridden by the desire for simplicity and peace. Who knows? I'd hoped that it would get me all excited about finally getting around to reading him, but it did not.
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