The Last Station

Seen at: Lyric Cinema Cafe, 4:30 pm today

Just as I was catching up on my movie reviews and movie going, a mild cold sidelined me for a couple days. I should have known that a few days out the Sun, and Vitamin D, would take its toll after so much outdoor activity.

Today I felt well enough to venture and take in The Last Station, which brings me one step closer to a complete Oscar nomination card for tomorrow.

The story takes place in 1910---a hundred years ago---during the last months of Leo Tolstoi's life. The casting here is superb. Christopher Plummer was fun to see on screen, right after seeing him as Dr. Parnassus. In a way, the two movies are similar, and Tolstoy and Parnassas as screen characters have much overlap. There is a youthful love drama going on as well.

Having spent a few summers in Russia, I had flashbacks watching this movie (even though it was shot in Germany). There's a nice verisimilitude about the setting.

That being said, the story left me somewhat alienated. It get where it was trying to go---setting the duality of noble purpose between idealized love for humanity, and concrete love for those around us (especially erotic, romantic love). The story thrusts this duality on the male-female divide, following the old classical formula male=idealized purpose, female=concrete here-and-now. James McAvoy plays a Postmodern boy-man learning to be a man who can love (same old hero as we see in every movie now) but it works, because he is portrayed as a young virgin.

But somehow all these great characters, including Mirren's countess, just didn't add up to a full emotional story for me. I felt like I was being pulled by sentiment. This was no where more clear than when Mirren was on screen. She is a fine actress, one of the best, but her powerful acting here actually seemed to point out to me what was lacking in tying together all the emotion that was being handed to us.

I'm overly bashing this movie. It certainly wasn't bad. But it reminded me in many ways of a watered down version of Reds, a movie I once liked, then turned my back on, but which I now acknowledge as the masterpiece that I first discerned in my youth. Sometimes there is wisdom is being young. Plummer's Tolstoy would wink at that and smile.