In a train station in Siena, Italy, a younger Michael Hoffman needed something to read. While his Italian was good, an entire novel seemed a stretch. So he chose one of the three English- language books lying about: Jay Parini’s 1990 historical novel, “The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year.”
One might assume, then, that this was the kind of kismet that immediately led to Hoffman’s latest film. Not quite, says the writer-director.
“The Last Station” stars Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren as the long-married, sparring and teasing couple Leo and Sofya Tolstoy (each was just nominated for an Oscar).
“What’s really intriguing to me now is that I didn’t see a movie then,” Hoffman says.
He liked the book. He went on to read “Anna Karenina” and pored over biographies of the great Russian author who, at the end of his life, had given his estate over to the “people” and become an advocate for vegetarianism and celibacy.
“But I didn’t see a movie in it.”
Then in 2004, Hoffman reread the novel while in search of something to direct. This time, he says, “I could see the film very clearly.”
What had changed in those intervening years?
“I had gotten married,” Hoffman says. “I’d been married for 14 years and I understood their story, not as a biopic about Tolstoy, but as a film about love and marriage.”
Amend that list to read a film about bickering and playfulness, devotion and a dash of occasional contempt. It also contains a charming story of new love, featuring the talented James McAvoy and Kerry Condon as Tolstoy’s personal secretary Valentin and his beloved Masha, a fellow devotee of the Russian master.
A five-decade-long romantic and creative partnership would be challenge enough. The Tolstoys had 13 children. And Sofya copied “War & Peace” by hand six times. Stir into that mix the machinations of Tolstoy disciple Vladimir Chertkov, who saw himself as the true custodian of Tolstoy’s work. The tussles between Sofya and Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) are pitched, absurd, painful.
“These people lived in an absolute fishbowl,” says Hoffman. “Because Tolstoy said he wanted nothing to do with private property, anyone who wanted to be on his land could be. There were people camped outside on the lawn all the time. Sometimes up to four film crews would be shooting them.”
Add to this Chertkov’s competing narrative of the man, and you have outsized drama. Hoffman refers to it as Sofya and Chertkov’s “propaganda war.”
Hoffman directed Robert Downey Jr. in “Restoration” and Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney in “One Fine Day.” He also provided hysterical guidance to Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg and Sally Field in “Soapdish,” the 1991 comedy about daytime TV stars and their egos. So he’s hardly offended when a viewer finds soap operatics at play in “The Last Station.”
There is something large, theatrical even, in the performances. For Sofya — and Chertkov — the audience is history itself.
“They were very conscious of being watched,” says Hoffman, “particularly Sofya. She was very conscious of herself as a performer. She was always interested in the effects she created.”
In this regard, Mirren is spot on. A late scene shows Sofya toggling between grief and awareness to delicious effect.
“Helen has worked so much. She’s had such success in film, theater and television,” says the director of his leading lady. “She comes in beyond prepared. She really sees the beat of things, the arc of things. She’s very conscious of things. She understands this piece as a storyteller.”
At one point, Sofya says to Leo, “I am the work of your life and you are mine.” It’s a line straight out of Hoffman’s own marital memory bank.
The first time he saw future wife Samantha Silva, it was at a coffee shop. “I thought two things,” he recalls: ” ‘The party’s over,’ and ‘this is the work of the rest of my life.’ ” (For Silva’s part, says Hoffman, she threatens to write a column called “Art Imitates Wife” and send it to the New York Times.)
There may be quibbles about the history, though the production had the blessing of Tolstoy’s descendents. What Hoffman is confident about is the sublime and absurd truths of marriage, played out in Sofya and Leo’s relationship.
“You live a tragic comedy in a marriage,” he says. “Aristotle said tragedy ends with the death of a hero and comedy ends with the reunion of lovers.” Both happen in “The Last Station.”
For Hoffman, the film is a wrestling match with “the difficulty of living with love, and the impossibility of living without.” It is a bout both sublime and ridiculous.
