'The Last Station'

Leo Tolstoy's rural estate was called Yasnaya Polyana -- "serene glade." But life in Tolstoy's birchy glade was far from serene in the great Russian writer's final months.

Tolstoy had lived a rich, full, hedonistic and almost incomparably creative life, had written two of the most revered novels of the 19th century - "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace" -- and was one of the most famous men alive. Now 82 years old, he had retreated to the large manor house at Yasnaya Polyana in order, he said, to live a life of poverty, vegetarianism, celibacy and emphatically non-denominational spirituality.

He was accompanied by his wife, the Countess Sofya, and surrounded by his followers. The "Tolstoyans" dressed like peasants, worked in the fields, and were, in theory at least, devoted to unselfish, non-carnal love of their fellow creatures, determined to free their minds of greed, lust, gluttony and self-regard. How that worked out is the subject of director Michael Hoffman's mildly disappointing new movie "The Last Station," which stars Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy.

At the center of the movie is a conflict between the volatile Sofya (Helen Mirren) and a manipulative Tolstoy disciple named Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). They are battling over the writer's will, and in particular the disposition of the immensely valuable copyrights to his works. Chertkov pushes Tolstoy to live up to his professed ideals and surrender the copyrights "to the Russian people." Well played by Giamatti, Chertkov has a steely Lenin-like glint in his eye. He is a fanatic, but a sly one.

Sofya wants the earnings from the books to support the large Tolstoy family, herself included. And, while her husband is still alive, she wants to keep at least some of the love he professes for all mankind for herself. After all, she has, as she keeps reminding him, borne him 13 children and stuck by him through all manner of misadventures. She is jealous of Chertkov, and suspicious of all the followers who stand around the house, taking notes on Tolstoy's every utterance.

Maybe they need to take notes, since very little he says in this film is memorable. The movie has been showing for a couple of months on the coasts, and critics have tended to view it favorably, with particular praise for the performance of Helen Mirren. She and Plummer both have been nominated for Oscars. I note that out of fairness, but I have to add that "The Last Station" left me cold or at least lukewarm, in part because Mirren and Plummer's whooping and swooping and dinnerware-hurling and chicken-clucking (I'm serious) seem irritatingly over the top, even for 19th-century Russians. At times, "The Last Station" feels like an overwrought college production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf."

The movie spends so much time on clearly unhinged bickering between Tolstoy and Sofya that it trivializes the characters. And we never learn enough about Tolstoy's spiritual vision, which would influence, among others, Mahatma Gandhi, to decide whether it had any value, whether it was worth preserving.

"The Last Station" was based on a Jay Parini novel of the same name. In a novel, the author can fully develop the characters, bring us their past lives and their history together, make us understand why they and their story are important. But director Michael Hoffman does not do that. Instead, we are left with a husband and wife who fight a lot over the husband's foolish notions.

As a result, it's hard to care very much when the two accomplished actors chew the scenery and smash the dinnerware as they battle over the will, and we are not emotionally prepared for the final scenes of the movie, with reporters from around the world camped in tents outside a rural train station waiting for the great man to die. On the evidence of the movie, Tolstoy is not King Lear or even Willie Loman, he's just this scatterbrained old man who can't make up his mind what he really believes in or who he loves.

The best parts of "The Last Station" come when Mirren and Plummer are off screen or in the background, and two young people who idolize Tolstoy, played by James McAvoy and Kerry Condon, get to know each other. They discover that love of mankind is not the only kind of love there is, and that not all couples waste their time fighting dubious battles.

Opens Feb. 19