Last station

By accident, I watched a movie's deleted scenes before I'd seen the feature. I'll try not to do it again, even though The Missed Station showed me that its stars had a lot of four-lettered fun missing cues and mugging on the early-20th-Century Russian sets of The Last Station. On several occasions, they'd clearly found their dialogue not just funny but daft. Me too.

Michael Hoffman wrote and directed the adaptation of a novel about Count Leo Tolstoy's last years. I guess the book was also a twee portrait of an ageing writer (Christopher Plummer) who founded a pacifist, atheistic and anti-materialist movement; his histrionic, money-conscious and overly loving wife Sofya (Helen Mirren); and the inexplicably influential associate Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) who wanted Tolstoy to bequeath his copyrights to the socio-political movement.

The tale is told through the eyes, and diaries, of Tolstoy's new private secretary (James McAvoy). Serving his master mostly as a conversational companion, the young, vegetarian, virgin disciple of the peace-seeking Tolstoyan movement lives in the Count's rural mansion and the movement 's commune, a two-hour buggy-ride away in the countryside. Seduced by an emotionally brazen commune member (Kerry Condon), McAvoy's nervous sneezer discovers the passion of love. That is the one fundamental belief in Tolstoy's life and thoughts, we are told, frequently.

Even so, it's hard to sense what Hoffman is showing us. Is his movie simply an historical period piece, a la Merchant-Ivory costume dramas, or a parable about generations of love? A tale of disappointed dreams or political chicanery? A scenery-chewed showcase for a pair of old superstars or an ensemble work of lushly-filmed Russian reality? The initial sense of tweeness was reinforced by whimsical soundtrack music, ostentatious period details and an overall air of detachment. At the end, one may ask why Tolstoy's daughter Sasha was incorporated in the screenplay, but not the son we saw briefly and the Tolstoys' other children.

Did I care if Tolstoy died happily, if Sofya ensured her children's inheritance, if McAvoy's loving puppy became a wiser dog, if the unbelievably liberated young woman was merely a late-20th-Century invention? She was, and the screenplay totally avoided the fact that everybody and everything they believed soon became irrelevant, after Lenin arrived at the station in Moscow.