3-04-10 Movie Review: The Last Station

The big news this week is the annual collection of Academy Award-nominated short subjects, and get your pencils ready, because this is complicated.

All the Oscar-nominated shorts, documentaries, live actions, and animations, are shown only twice, 10 a.m. the next two Saturdays, in the Warren Theatre Old Town, and they usually run about four and a half hours: that's the whole set, Saturdays the 6th and 13th, starting at 10 a.m., Warren Theatre Old Town. That's the easy part of the schedule. All the other showings are live actions and animations only, NOT documentaries, at village branch libraries. Sunday is the Alford branch, 3447 S. Meridian, at 1 p.m. All the rest are at 5: Monday at Rockwell, 5939 East 9th; Tuesday at Westlink, 8515 Bekemeyer; Wednesday at Central downtown; Thursday Evergreen 2601 N. Arkansas. Got all that? If not, call the library, 261-8500.

And tomorrow night the Murdock is showing one of the oddest movies I've ever seen, Delicatessen, called by Leonard Maltin one of the funniest movies about cannibalism ever made, obviously not for all tastes -- and while I'm at it, let me remember to remind you that not all the Oscar shorts are suitable for children -- but I guarantee you've never seen anything quite like Delicatessen, from France in 1991, about hard times in a post-apocalyptic world, 7:30 in the Murdock, 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have Oscar-nominated Helen Mirren in The Last Station, about the famously unsatisfactory marriage of Leo Tolstoy of War and Peace fame and his wife, who Mirren plays.

Leo Tolstoy is the one who started Anna Karenina with the unjustly famous statement that "All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion," which I recommend anybody who believes to look into the marriages of Benjamin Disraeli or Cole Porter. The Last Station also has him saying "Everything that I know I know only because I love, " which leaves me wondering how he learned about the Napoleonic wars. The Last Station does not indulge much in the search for deep truth, and we are perhaps just as well off, if such utterances are the best Mr. Tolstoy had to offer. We don't even learn much about the rather primitive notions of Christianity, if that's what they were, that Tolstoy's life was devoted to near the end, or what the work is that he claims to be doing after he has repudiated his writings and tried to lead the world to a better and simpler way of life.

What is about is his relations with his wife, in their very later years, and it has fun with that, though you may not be satisfied with what you are shown about that, either. If you expect love to include a certain amount of adaptation to and even sacrifice service to a loved one, you may wonder what this erratic and almost violent relationships really is; it looks a lot like Hollywood's customary equation of love with bodily desire. Aside from sex, it's hard to tell what is holding Christopher Plummer's Tolstoy together with Mirren, and the parallels with the story of Tolstoy's secretary, James McAvoy, and Tolstoy's daughter, Kerry Condon, don't make things any more serious.

But it's always a kick to see veterans like Plummer and Mirren, who know how to do it, go over the top with performances like theirs, and no doubt a lot of people will get a kick out of seeing physical lust so thoroughly enjoyed by people in their twilight years.