Review of The Last Station (2009) by Ted N — 28 Aug 2010

Great writers - especially in the 19th and early 20th Century, when people still believed you could change the world by making stuff up, became superstars; and the biggest of all of them was Leo Tolstoy. In an age of the great Utopians, Tolstoy went beyond his fiction to become, in later life, a secular guru, offering salvation through simplicity, labour and a return to the timeless ways of the slav. Trouble was, this involved giving away his worldly goods and leaving his royalties to "the Russian People". His wife the Countess understandable wasn't keen.

The fight over his literary and intellectual heritage, played out between his wife (Helen Mirren) and the fervent followers personified by the leader of his followers (Paul Giamatti, brilliant as ever) is a kind of role reversal for those more used to the more familiar fight over the legacy of Thomas Hardy, in which his second wife Florence Emily conspired with the old snob to clean up his background - and parodied (caricatured) in Maugham's Cakes & Ale. Here his wife remembers his true nature - his followers are the ones who need him to die in their image.

Tolstoy famously ran away from his wife and died in a railway station surrounded by the first media circus to engulf an artist's last moments. The screenplay unfolds towards this climax, seen through the eyes of his newly arrived secretary Bulgakov (no, not THAT Bulgakov) played brilliantly by James McAvoy.

This riveting filmed play by Michael Hoffman provides a feast of great acting. It could hardly be otherwise with a cast like this. But the writing is also terrific - and that is so rare. Hoffman has clearly studied Chekhov to great effect. This study of a closed community surrounding the aging writer, everyone trapped, everyone in their own way wanting it to end, wanting freedom, is a typical Chekhovian situation - indeed, a typical sitcom situation. Hoffman employs Chekhov's trick of deflating moments of great drama with bathos - as when the Countess suffers one of her many attacks of the vapours and falls to the ground complaining of stabbing pains - and it turns out she has fallen on a fork.

That is pure Anton Pavlovich.

Marvellous.