'The Last Station' will pull you in

I am not what you would call a fan of period films, especially if the period the film is discussing is before the 1940. The elaborate costumes, flowery speech in everyday conversation, and the staunch propriety with which people of earlier ages seemed to conduct their lives nearly put me to sleep. These films, while definitely examples of the elegant beauty and craftsmanship that takes to design costumes and authentic sets, do not much hold my interest to what the characters are doing and saying because the aforementioned factors are too much to ignore.

So when I decided to watch “The Last Station,” a period film and biopic about late Russian author Leo Tolstoy, writer of two of the most well-revered, but lengthy tomes of the past century’s literature (“War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”), I must have been out of my mind, right?

Well, not quite. The immediate answer of why I watched was the presence of James McAvoy in the cast. I have been a fan of his for quite some time, after enjoying his presence in many films, especially “Atonement” and “The Last King of Scotland.” (In “The Last Station,” he plays Valentin Bulgakov, a young, eager disciple of Tolstoy’s who comes to the author’s home in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, to become his secretary.) And hey, a film’s nothing without a bit of eye candy to hold interest, right?

But after seeing the film, I realized that while he was integral to my enjoyment of the film, Mr. McAvoy was not the only stunningly beautiful thing in this film. I admired what the film portrayed as Tolstoy’s thoughts on love and a life free of material wants, and a struggle to keep the balance between those two ideals. These tales were culled from a series of diaries kept by the real-life counterparts of the characters in the film.

The plot is thus: it is 1910, the last year of over 80 successful ones Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) has led on earth. His home in Yasnaya Polyana is surrounded by his disciples, who lovingly refer to themselves as “Tolstoyans,” and equate Tolstoy and writing and philosophies to Christ and his Sermon on the Mount. (Well, he is not “Christ,” as Christ is Christ, the characters confirm, but Tolstoy is the closest thing on earth to Him). It is the determination of the Tolstoyans, led by the author’s friend and advisor, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), that Tolstoy sign a new Last Will and Testament that will hand over all of the copyrights to his work to the people of Russia. His wife, Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren) is enraged by this prospect: she believes that if the Russian people have power to his work, she and their eight children will not receive enough financial support after his death. She also believes that she is as much an owner of his works as he; she helped him write many of them. As the feud between Chertkov/the Tolstoyans and Sofya widens, the elderly scribe begins to move to another location to finish his work, but falls ill on the journey. A train station in Astapovo (the “last station” for which the film is named) is where he makes his death bed.

Soon, it becomes evident that “War and Peace” is not only the title of Tolstoy’s famous work; these opposing themes seem to mar what become the last days of his life and cause pain in his marriage to Sofya.

The Tolstoyan credo preaches peace, love, and living in harmony without material possessions. This school of thought is so influential that it has been followed by later world peacemakers, such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. However, the man who preaches these ideas seems to do better with theorizing them than putting them into practice. Sure, he and Sofya have a long-lasting marriage, but they war over their philosophies. While Leo is embarrassed by living extravagantly and having material possessions, Sofya wants to hold on to them: she loves living in her large estate, wearing finery, and the overall status she has with being a countess. She wants to live this way even after her husband is gone.

The polarity in the couple’s thoughts may be why Leo seems to become more enamored with the Tolstoyans (he even went so far as to replace a picture in his study that had been of himself and Sofya to one of himself and Chertkov) than the woman he has spent decades with. It seems that Tolstoy is more at peace with the people who love him, rather than the people who love him and expect that love back in an equal amount.

But is Sofya really so selfish in her wants? She worked hard in their marriage--she bore him eight children, helped him write his books, and stayed with him even though his philosophies conflicted with hers. Shouldn’t she be able to enjoy the fruits of her labor?

In the midst of this, Valentin is between the bickering couple. Even though he was sent to the author’s home at the suggestion of Chertkov, he finds himself needing to mediate the opposing sides. Aside from this, his allegiance to Tolstoyan views on love are not matched by his first real lover, Masha (Kerry Condon), who does not seem to match his voracity for the mantras. Valentin must learn to make his own experiences and lessons with love.

You don’t have to shy away from this film if you know nothing about Tolstoy or his works; that’s not what the story is about. The beauty of this film to someone who doesn’t typically like period pieces is that it strips away may of the dull conventions of the typical “age” film. Sure, the costumes and sets are integral to the story (the Russian countryside is beautiful; and the costumes show the balance between Sofya’s fine taste and the Tolstoyans’ non-materialism), but the story is typical of what a real married couple goes through, making it more human and relatable to someone during any age. It goes to show that any married couple has to deal with milestones in their lives, and that they are at times difficult to contend with, no matter how long they have been together. It also goes to show that no matter how revered, no hero comes without their flaws. To show that such a respected figure had these struggles makes him even more relatable--he is a human trying to figure out life, just as the rest of us are, and that journey doesn’t end no matter how old we become.

The entire cast conveyed the story superbly: there was hope that giving Tolstoy’s works to the Russian people would bring peace, but this was not without the fury of a warring couple who needed to please themselves just as much as they needed to please others. Seasoned actors Plummer and Mirren are still on top of their game, and were much deserving of the many nominations (including a Golden Globe and Academy Award, each) that they garnered from their performances.

“The Last Station” is on DVD now.

'Juliet': Not quite letter-perfect, but still worth a view

“Letters to Juliet” begins to almost every girl’s showcase of an ideal romance: the main character, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), is about to be married and sets off to beautiful Verona, Italy, to spend some time with her fiancé, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) before their marriage.

The couple must take this “pre-honeymoon,” as Sophie calls it, because Victor will be too busy opening his restaurant after their wedding. A “pre-honeymoon” seems a fair enough compromise if the destination is Italy with a gorgeous man at your side, right? That’s what Sophie is hoping for as she traverses the Italian city, but Victor has his restaurant on his mind. He is too consumed with going to wine auctions and cheese tastings, and other cities that are too far from fair Verona for Sophie to be interested in. So, he goes to them and she stays.

Many tourists, including Sophie, come to Verona to see Juliet’s house — Juliet, of course, being the tragic heroine of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” Once she arrives at the house, Sophie sees many women in the courtyard who are crying and heartbroken and writing letters to Juliet asking her advice to restore their hope of true love again.

At the end of the day, Sophie sees a woman collecting the letters that have been pasted on the courtyard’s wall. She follows the woman and finds that she, along with three others, are a collective known as the “Secretaries of Juliet,” the people who write responses to the women’s letters. The idea of the secretaries is appealing to Sophie; not only do these women provide solid and experience-backed responses to the love woes of the letter-writers (with the distance Victor ignorantly creates between the two, Sophie could definitely use some of this advice), but also that the secretaries write such moving responses that the women who receive them could totally change their perspectives of love based upon them.

Using words as influence is what Sophie had been striving for in her career before she left for Verona—she was an employee of the New Yorker who wanted a promotion from being a fact checker to a certified published reporter.

The next day, when Victor leaves Sophie for this dealing or that, she once again visits the secretaries and helps them collect the letters from the wall. Doing so, she accidentally knocks a brick out of the wall and finds a letter that a girl had written to Juliet over 50 years ago.

Later, we find that the girl is an Englishwoman named Claire who had studied in Italy and fell in love an Italian man named Lorenzo Bartolini. When she returned to England, she regretfully never told Lorenzo her true feelings.

Sophie is inspired by the letter, and believes it deserves an answer, though she realizes that responding would be taking a leap of faith that Claire and Lorenzo are still around and are still interested in each other.

Lo and behold, the letter does reach Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) and she comes to Verona almost immediately with her grandson, Charlie (Christopher Egan). Charlie is none too happy that Sophie has dug up his grandmother’s fifty-year old past and love: he believes that her true soul mate was his grandfather. However, Claire is receptive to finding Lorenzo again and thanks Sophie for rekindling her old feelings of him. After doing a search and finding more than 50 Lorenzo Bartolinis spread across the Italian countryside, Claire, Charlie and Sophie (who tags along after Victor leaves her for business dealings yet again), set off to find which Lorenzo still has Claire’s heart. While Claire and Sophie are optimistic that Lorenzo can be located, Charlie grumbles at every Bartolini house they visit that turns out not to be the “one,” fearing that Claire will be heartbroken again not only from Lorenzo, but because she had already had to deal with the death of her husband.

Predictably (and happily), Claire locates the right Lorenzo (Franco Nero, Redgrave’s real-life husband) just as the group was about to give up and head back to Verona, and then home. The two fall back into their old feelings for each other, immediately loving the emotions that they had been transported back 50 years. In a vow not to let another 50 years pass them apart, the two marry a few months after their reunion.

The film places an interesting role reversal in terms of romance and relationships. Upon receiving the letter, the elder Claire instantly transforms back into a teenager in puppy love, remembering how handsome Lorenzo was, and undoubtedly how he caused her heart to skip a beat. Though she realizes that with such an amount of time that Lorenzo may not be located again, she certainly does not seem to let this bother her through most of their excursion (when they reach the place that she is almost certain he lives, she at first balks nervously, but then falls right into his arms).

Meanwhile, the younger Sophie, who herself is supposed to be exploring the beginnings of romance on her own, is forced to contend (and bicker) with the men in her life, the negligent Victor and the disagreeable Charlie. However, watching Claire’s reunion-in-progress is a happy diversion from the uncertainty of what Sophie’s fate will be at the end of the film.

However, though Sophie may seem downtrodden while interacting with these frustrating men, she still believed in the beauty of romance and conveyed that so well in her letter that Claire was inspired to feel the same, even after she had experienced the loss of her husband, and as we find out later in the film, her son (Charlie’s father, to a car accident). The perspectives on love from both the young and the old — the feelings of puppy love, and the time that is needed to foster a romance — is truly one of the heartwarming parts of this film.

Though it may seem odd that women are entrusting Juliet, whose fate was suicide after she learned that she could not be with her lover, to help them with matters of the heart, this device requires a bit of suspension of disbelief. Yes, Juliet had a tragic fate, but what she and Claire knew is that it is devastating to be in love with someone, but not be able to be with them because of time, distance, or other factors. But Claire never gave up on being with Lorenzo again. The fact that she could wait for him all of those years, and they fall in love again so deeply that they want to spend the rest of their lives together shows that she had much deeper feelings for him than the initial lust she might have felt as a teenager. This is also what Claire tries to teach Sophie: it’s not just a matter of being with the one you love, but having that person appreciate you for who you are, and what each person can add to the relationship.

Overall, “Letters” is a lightweight and agreeable slice of cinematic romance. The only thing you’ll really hate about it is not being in the middle of the lush Italian scenery yourself (the cinematography gives you such an envy-inducing view).

To watch: “Letters” is availabe on DVD on Sept. 14.