Michael Hoffman (2009)
On 13 May 1909, Leo Tolstoy wrote as follows to Sofya, his wife of 46 years, in a letter to be opened after his death:
‘I write to you from beyond the grave in order to tell you what I wanted to tell you many times and for so many years and for your own good, but was unable to tell you while I was alive. I know that if I had been better and kinder I would have been able to tell you during my lifetime in such a way that you would have listened to me, but I was unable to. … I have nothing to forgive you for; you were what your mother made you; a kind and faithful wife and a good mother.
… Just because you were what your mother made you and stayed like that and didn’t want to change, didn’t want to work on yourself, to progress towards goodness and truth, but on the contrary clung with such obstinacy to all that was most evil and the opposite of all that was most dear to me, you did a lot of evil to other people and sank lower and lower yourself and reached the pathetic condition you are now in.’
These extracts from the letter appear in A N Wilson’s piece about The Last Station (and a new film of The Kreutzer Sonata) that appeared in the TLS earlier this month. Although I’d not come across the letter before, I knew that the end of the Tolstoys’ life together was notoriously unhappy: when I read an article, some three or four years ago, about plans to make a film of The Last Station, which Michael Hoffman has adapted from Jay Parisi’s 1990 ‘biographical novel’ of the same name, it was the Count’s unkind treatment of the Countess that was particularly emphasised. It’s not unusual for biopics about great lives to tone down the less attractive qualities of their protagonists but doing so in this case makes a particularly crucial difference. Hoffman’s film focuses on the last months of Tolstoy’s long life (he died in November 1910 at the age of 82); the relationship between him and Sofya is the heart of the picture. You would never believe from The Last Station that he was capable of writing that shocking letter to her.
The scene-setting legends on the screen at the start include a quote from War and Peace – ‘Everything I know I know only because I love’. The words are attributed to Tolstoy rather than to whichever character speaks them in the novel but no matter: we accept that they announce a major theme of the film to follow. It’s unclear at the end of The Last Station whether that epigraph was being used ironically. Are we to understand that it was Sofya, in her absolute devotion to her husband, who practised what he preached, whereas Tolstoy, who wrote a great deal about love, human and divine, and its meaning, became incapable of loving his wife? Are the words from War and Peace meant to point up a disjunction between love of humanity, which Tolstoy appears to have had abundantly, and love between individual human beings? That the film prompts but doesn’t resolve these questions might be seen as a strong point. I don’t think it is because The Last Station obscures and tries to divert attention from the depth of the animosity between the Tolstoys. As a result, it’s frustrating and unsatisfying. It was never going to be a box-office smash so it’s a pity that Michael Hoffman hasn’t dared to be tougher on his hero.
Hoffman seems undecided even about how dominant the Tolstoys’ relationship is meant to be in the story. He clearly sees it as needing a parallel love affair to shore it up – between Valentin Bulgakov, who goes to Tolstoy’s home at Yasnaya Polyana as his new secretary, and Masha, a girl he meets on the Tolstoyan commune that forms part of the estate. Sofya rather than Leo Tolstoy is the star of the film, in terms of screen time and thanks to Helen Mirren’s performance. If Hoffman was determined to diminish the role of Tolstoy himself, he might have done better to reduce it further, so that The Last Station concentrated on the battle for possession between Sofya and the Tolstoyans – with Tolstoy himself the pivotal and most powerful figure in the story but tantalisingly absent from the screen. (The Tolstoyans, led by Vladimir Chertkov, want the old man to change his will so that the copyright in his work is transferred on his death to the Russian people rather than his widow.) As it is, Hoffman seems to be protecting Tolstoy’s reputation in the wrong way and, as Christopher Plummer plays him, the great writer is crotchety and hot-tempered but benign. The octogenarian Plummer is strikingly handsome rather than charismatic, and the character he projects is certainly not emotionally brutal. It’s a scrupulous and skilled piece of acting but not discomfiting in the way that it needs to be.
There are understandable reasons, of course, for avoiding showing Tolstoy as a villain in his treatment of his wife. His philosophy – opposing private property while advocating passive resistance – could be seen to anticipate what was good, while avoiding what was bad, about the ambitions of the eventual Russian Revolution. It’s a philosophy that is widely believed to have influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The difficulty is that making Tolstoy inoffensive makes no sense in a story centred on his marriage. (Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela in Invictus may not be a great performance but it’s reasonably satisfying given what Clint Eastwood’s film is about. You wouldn’t, however, expect the same performance in a dramatisation of the relationship between Mandela and his first wife Winnie.) Plummer’s Tolstoy isn’t fervent enough – he’s more genially wearied by the zeal of the adherents to his cause. This is a particular problem when Tolstoy sets out from Yasnaya Polyana on the journey that will take him to the railway station at Astapovo: his compulsion to do this comes out of nowhere – and what he’s intending to do isn’t even clear. (The Wikipedia entry on Tolstoy suggests, without citing evidence for this, that he meant to end his days as a wandering ascetic.)
The imbalance in the script between the roles of Tolstoy and his wife also creates difficulties for the actress playing Sofya. As a substitute for probing the hostility between them, Hoffman supplies merely melodramatic behaviour on her part, which turns the Countess into a drama queen: you can understand why she gets on her husband’s nerves. The reasons for his hostility seem to derive from her irritating personality rather than her continued conventional religious faith, which barely gets a mention, and belief in private property, which Helen Mirren rattles on about amusingly but without our being led to think it’s a crucial factor. Mirren brings tensions to The Last Station that it badly needs: her sexually compelling presence makes Sofya hard to dismiss or despise. She does some very good things – like the way she pronounces the name of the Tolstoyan commune to let you know what she thinks of it. (It’s something like ‘Tintasvili’ – it certainly rhymes with silly, anyway.) When Tolstoy inveighs against their wealth and privilege, Mirren’s response – ‘You were always the first with your nose in the trough’ – has the authentic cadence of a repeated domestic row. But this is an actress who projects a particular kind of intelligence – an intelligence that makes it hard for her to play a character who’s easily fooled. Sofya keeps humiliating herself and telling us she’s put her foot in it again: you never believe Mirren as someone who thinks that, when things go wrong, it’s bound to be her fault. (Who would have been better cast in the role? When I first read about the project, Meryl Streep was going to play Sofya, with Anthony Hopkins as Tolstoy, but Streep too might have struggled to get Sofya’s limited intellect and her high-strung brilliance could have got in the way. Judi Dench might have been a little too old for the role – Sofya was sixteen years her husband’s junior – but she could have worked: she has an uncanny ability to suggest different types of mind and to illuminate ordinariness.)
As young Valentin Bulgakov, James McAvoy is, as usual, very eager to please. On his first journey to Yasnaya Polyana, McAvoy overdoes unassuming joie de vivre. (As Pauline Kael said of Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, MacAvoy ‘is ingratiating – he doesn’t need to act ingratiating’.) But the underlying problem here is not with the performer but with the fact that the role of Bulgakov, like that of Masha, the girl he loves, is a makeweight. Hoffman denies McAvoy opportunities to show what either his changing priorities or the conflict of loyalties he experiences through his attachments to both the Tolstoys mean to Bulgakov – and James McAvoy, although he’s a good actor, isn’t strong or inventive enough to fill this gap in the script. This affable but initially rigid young Tolstoyan sloughs off celibacy without a second thought (and McAvoy, because he’s shown a surfeit of awestruck delight early on, doesn’t leave himself the scope for a sufficiently big reaction to losing his virginity). McAvoy is affecting when he sends a desperate telegram to Masha, who’s gone back to Moscow, from the station at Astapovo where Tolstoy is dying. But his grief at Tolstoy’s death needs to register as something more complex than that of the peasants lining the tracks of the station to pay tribute, and it doesn’t. (And when Masha then appears in the crowd and she and Bulgakov are reunited it’s an anti-climax.) Instead of writing a rounded character, Hoffman gives Bulgakov the tiresome idiosyncrasy of sneezing whenever he’s feeling nervous. As you might expect, he feels nervous rather often.
Kerry Condon, as Masha, is a bit too obviously seductive in her early scenes with McAvoy but she’s a compelling presence, even when Masha stops being challenging and even though the script doesn’t make clear why she starts thinking more seriously about Bulgakov. I liked Patrick Kennedy in the small role of the dark-bearded commune superintendent – he’s quietly convincing as a pathological fanatic. Anne-Marie Duff is largely wasted as Tolstoy’s daughter: here too, Hoffman seems caught in two minds as to whether Sasha is the cold-hearted bitch her mother accuses her of being, or struggling with emotionally contradictory impulses towards her parents. But all four of McAvoy, Condon, Kennedy and Duff are admirable in their refusal to take refuge in the period setting – their characters are more real because their emotions seem modern and accessible. This isn’t the case with Paul Giamatti as Chertkov and John Sessions as Tolstoy’s doctor. Sessions is a very good impressionist but, when he can’t fall back on his skill for mimicry, he seems at a loss: the characterisation is unstable from one scene to the next. Giamatti is a more surprising disappointment: he makes Chertkov crudely oleaginous and self-serving, and seems to be commenting on rather than interpreting the character – it’s in all respects an unsympathetic performance. The closing legends, which stress his lifelong devotion to the Tolstoyan creed, suggest that Chertkov deserved a fairer hearing. What’s more, Giamatti seems to be commenting from a distance in time – a puzzle after his success playing John Adams in the HBO biopic serial. (Maybe it’s a nationality hang-up: it’s striking anyway how reliably good American actors can seem paralysed playing Europeans in period costume – Kathy Bates in Chéri was another recent example.)
At one point, Bulgakov accuses Chertkov of wanting Tolstoy ‘to be an icon’. My immediate reaction was to cringe, given the overuse and devaluation of the word nowadays. But then I thought of its original meaning and was reminded of a shot of Christopher Plummer’s noble-looking Tolstoy in profile that made him look, for all his repudiation of organised religion, very like a Russian Orthodox icon. Hoffman’s presentation of Tolstoy’s astonishing celebrity is one of the most interesting things in the film – the photographers and notetakers at Yasnaya Polyana, the international press corps camping out at Astapovo waiting for bulletins on the great man’s state of health. (I’d always had the image of him expiring alone on a bench at the railway station – I never realised he was laid up in bed there for days with half the world in attendance.) It’s a pity that the continual scribing, which drives Sofya crazy, culminates in an awkward joke: just when Tolstoy is on the point of signing over the copyright in his work, neither he nor Chertkov nor the commune superintendent can find a pen, which Bulgakov eventually supplies. The closing legends explain that the Russian Senate voted, several years after Tolstoy’s death, to transfer the copyright back to Sofya.
27 February 2010
