The Last Station

Directed by Michael Hoffman

(R)

***

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Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya, face the author’s final days.

An account of the fraught final year of Leo Tolstoy’s life, The Last Station is the “kind of movie that gives literature a bad name,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Self-consciously serious and overly dramatic, the film aims to tell the story of the domestic war and peace between Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya, in the final years of their lives. In a grand display of acting fireworks, Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren play the troubled couple. Plummer’s Tolstoy is a “volatile Russian Santa Claus,” while Mirren’s Sofya is an emotional wreck, delivering operatic tirades one second and falling into desperate neediness the next. The actors occasionally overdo the drama, but that’s what keeps the film from becoming a musty piece of Masterpiece Theatre, said Stephen Farber in The Hollywood Reporter. Together, their performances give The Last Station an “emotional wallop” that historical dramas usually lack. The two “performing demons go at each other full-tilt and produce scenes of Shakespearean affection, chagrin, and rage,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. Watching them share the screen is like spending a “great night at the theater.”