The Last Station

The Last Station is a layered, full and fun tale of two love stories, one just beginning and one nearing its end. It speaks to us of the hardships of living with love and the impossibility of living without it.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) has been married to the devoted Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren) for almost 50 years when Tolstoy turns their lives upside down. He creates a new religion and this preeminent Russian novelist renounces his noble title, his property and even his family – a wife and three children – and plunges into his new philosophy of poverty, celibacy and vegetarianism.

Sofya is consumed with rage and determines she must fight back when she believes Tolstoy’s disciple, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) may have secretly convinced her husband to sign a new will leaving the rights to his novels to the Russian people rather than to his family. She uses every seductive weapon available to a woman of her time to fight for what she believes is rightfully hers. But as her behavior becomes more outrageous, Chertkov is more easily able to pursuade Tolstoy of the damage that her erratic conduct will do to his legacy.

Into this battleground stumbles Tolstoy’s new assistant, Valentin (James McAvoy). He quickly becomes a pawn of both the scheming Chertkov and then of the vengeful Sofya as each plots to eliminate the other’s influence with Tolstoy. Valentin’s life becomes even more complicated when he is overwhelmed by the passion he feels for Masha (Kerry Condon), another free thinking disciple of Tolstoy’s new religion whose unconventional attitudes about sex and love both compel and confuse him.

Valentin is ill-equipped to deal with the infatuation with Tolstoy’s concepts of idealized love and the complications of love in the real world in which he finds himself inextricably tangled.