Review: The Last Station (15)***

The Last Station shouts that message from the off and manages to avoid the very failing it so earnestly warns against. But just as Michael Hoffman's film looks at the myth-making that surrounded the elderly and ailing Leo Tolstoy in the final months before his death, in 1910, so this intricate and very worthy movie succumbs to a rather fatal blandness. Great acting cannot save it from itself.

At the core of the tale is Christopher Plummer's tremendous performance as the charismatic, Christ-like Tolstoy.

Now enjoying something of an Indian summer as he enters his eighties, Plummer brings a world-weary grace to a man who has outlived his time. Tolstoy needs to die. He needs to pass from life to death to legend.

Helping him, like a pharaoh's assistant, to prepare for that journey, is Paul Giamatti as an idealistic disciple who has already fashioned Tolstoy as a giant of literature and is ready

to transform him in death into a titan.

Fighting tooth and nail to prevent her husband being manipulated into giving away his royalties is his long-suffering and devoted wife, played with raw power by Helen Mirren, who wants whatever time she has left with this remarkable, infuriating man.

Witness to this extraordinary battle of wits and emotion is James McAvoy, as Valentin, the young assistant who must

set aside his wonder and engage with the real man inside the celebrity.

The Last Station is about a time of change and tumult. Tolstoy's genius belongs to a gentler age – an era before politics shattered Russia and turned its people into drones.

Always, Tolstoy rises above the bickering and internecine scrabbling. Plummer presents him as an elderly relic who knows his time has passed. All he has left is his books and his legacy. Thus Giamatti (as Vladimir Chertkov) is a tool, just as McAvoy is Boswell and Sofya (Mirren) is the guardian of a very different flame.

This is a magnificent story of loyalty and love. To the various protagonists of The Last Station, the two are indivisible. And when the sunset comes, it is with a whisper that, nonetheless, blows the irreversible wind of change across Moscow, the Steppes and beyond.