AWARD NOMINATIONS:
82nd Academy Awards: Best Actress: Helen Mirren, and Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer
2010 Golden Globes: Best Actress: Helen Mirren, and Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer
SYNOPSIS:
Set in the last tumultuous years of famed Russian author Leo Tolstoy's life, THE LAST STATION centers on the battle waged by his wife Sofya Andreyevna (Helen Mirren) and his leading disciple Vladimir Cherkov (Paul Giamatti). Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity and the reality of his enormous wealth, his thirteen children and a life of hedonism, Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) makes a dramatic flight from his home. Too ill to continue beyond the tiny rail station at Astapovo, he believes that he is dying alone, while over one hundred newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition. The whole affair is witnessed by Tolstoy’s new secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, whose burgeoning love for the beautiful and feisty Masha is set against the waning love of Tolstoy and Sofya. A tale of two romances, one beginning, one near its end, THE LAST STATION is a complex, funny, rich and emotional story about the difficulty of living with love and the impossibility of living without it.
REVIEW:
Helen Mirren outdoes even her Oscar-winning performance in THE QUEEN with her tour de force as Countess Sofya Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman's delightful THE LAST STATION. It's 1910, and the countess has been married for 48 years to Leo Tolstoy, the most famous author in the world. Although he still rides on horseback, the aged Tolstoy (a terrific Christopher Plummer) is nearing the end of his days and trying to ignore a pitched battle around him that almost rivals his most famous work, "War and Peace."
The combatants are the luxury-loving countess, the mother of his 13 children, and Vladimir Chertkov (a very fine Paul Giamatti), Tolstoy's longtime publisher -- and the chief disciple of a religious movement founded by the author, Tolstoyism. Chertkov is secretly plotting to get Tolstoy to rewrite his will so that the copyrights to his works will not go his well-heeled family but to the Russian people.
In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Sofya climbs outside a window to confirm her suspicions. The countess, who loves her husband deeply -- but does not subscribe to Tolstoyism's precepts of socialism, pacifism, social equality and especially celibacy -- is horrified and tries to seduce old Leo into compliance. But she underestimates the cunning of Chertkov, who whisks Tolstoy away from his country estate to sign a new will.... nypost.com
