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Canwest News Service
Filmmaking is a collaborative art, so why isn't film reviewing? Each week in this space, experts, artists and paying movie customers come together to take apart a recent release. It's salty. It's full of hot air. It's the Popcorn Panel.
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THIS WEEK'S PANEL – Alison Broverman is an arts reporter. She sits in cherry orchards and dreams of Moscow … sorry, wrong Russian writer. – Donna Tussing Orwin has been fascinated by Tolstoy since she was 19 years old, and has the good fortune to teach him and other Russian authors in the Slavic Department at the University of Toronto. – Chris Knight is the Post's chief film critic. He is rapidly overcoming his fear of reading Russian novelists.
This week's film The Last Station
Alison Full disclosure: I've never read any Tolstoy, and I know little about his life, so I'm curious to hear what our Russian literature professor has to say about the accuracy (or lack thereof ) of The Last Station. I'm always happy to see Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and Paul Giamatti in anything, but for the most part the film felt very heavy-handed to me, especially James McAvoy's annoying romantic subplot. (We get it! Sex will make you happier than communism!) There was too much of everything throughout the film, as if director Michael Hoffman didn't trust his audience to pick up on any subtleties and had to spell out every little thing.
Donna Chertkov and Countess Tolstoya did fight over Tolstoy and, among other things, the rights to his immensely valuable writings. This fight was the centre of the film, and it was well done. The audience could identify with Mirren's love for her husband and her sense of abandonment, and Giamatti was terrific as Chertkov the moral fanatic and creepy homewrecker. We learn almost nothing about Tolstoy beyond the fact that he, no doubt like Christopher Plummer, was an old, famous man whom everybody wanted part of. Aside from his wife, Plummer's Tolstoy is the main detractor of Tolstoyanism in the film; if that was the case in real life, why did the historical Tolstoy nourish the movement and lend it his name? I also found the romantic subplot a distraction. It was part of Michael Hoffman's attempt to make Tolstoy relevant to today's hip culture. "All you need is love, etc …"
Chris It seems like we all had too much of James McAvoy's love life; I wonder what form the film might have taken without the framing device of the hero-worshipping personal secretary? Perhaps one of those elaborately catered picnics might have included a little more Tolstoyan philosophy. Perhaps film was the wrong medium for this story to be told: the central issue of a man's legacy and copyright seems a better fit with the page than in a motion picture. All the shots of people falling into bed may have just been to give the story some much-needed movement.
Alison I didn't find Mirren's Sofya manipulative (or maybe I was just manipulated by her). Did she really copy out War and Peace six times? That certainly deserves some sort of remembrance in a will. In any case, I sympathized with the desperate heartbreak of the betrayed wife, and it is a testament to the strength of Mirren's performance that, despite the film's many niggling annoyances, I was moved to tears by the climactic death scene.
Donna Sofya Andreevna did copy War and Peace out many times as Tolstoy wrote and rewrote it over six years. Mirren's character was sympathetic, and the death scene was touching. As in the film, Sofya Andreevna was not allowed to see her husband until he was unconscious. There is no evidence so far as I know that the dying Tolstoy responded to his wife as he does in the film; that was a sentimental impulse by the filmmaker that Russians, with their love of the tragic, would have avoided. Jay Parini's book, on which the film is based, includes various writings by Tolstoy, so there we have more of an idea of what Tolstoy thought. In the film that is almost all cut, except for conversations in which Tolstoy says what the filmmaker wants to hear about love.
Chris I'd be keen to see something more on the real Tolstoy. I remember being quite grumpy about the fact that, in The Young Victoria, we see Prince Albert taking a bullet in the arm to protect his wife and Queen, an event which never actually happened. The more one knows about a particular facet of history, I suppose, the more the artistic license of the filmmakers rankles. Then again, it also provides a palatable introduction to a past realm. I'm definitely picking up one of Tolstoy's books — just as soon as I finish Stephen King's Under the Dome …
