“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”

~Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station is wonderful. Even if you don’t know much about Tolstoy or aren’t familiar with his writings, you’ll love this historically accurate movie.  James McAvoy, Helen Mirren, and Christopher Plummer offer a grand display of acting fireworks in The Last Station, writer-director Michael Hoffman’s juicy account of the tumultuous final year of Count Leo Tolstoy’s life.

In essence, the period dramedy is about the relationship between Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya (Mirren). It’s honest in its look at the ups and downs of married life. Tolstoy and Sofya are at war over Tolstoy’s legacy—a clash between ideals and reality, the flesh and the spirit. Tolstoy (Plummer) has renounced his title, thrown away material goods, his property, eating meat, and preached celibacy, (although he certainly didn’t practice it in his life) and helped develop the concept of passive resistance (one that he would pass along to Gandhi via letters). He is also about to sign away the rights to his novels to “the Russian people”—to the horror of his wife, Sofya. She’s determined to keep him from giving away his family’s inheritance, while the fanatical head of the Tolstoy movement, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), is dead set on getting Tolstoy to sign.

Caught in the middle is young Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), Tolstoy’s secretary, whom both Sofya and Chertkov try to inveigle to their cause. By the final year of his life, Tolstoy has thrown away material goods, preached celibacy (although didn’t practice it), and helped develop the very concept of passive resistance (one that he would pass along to Gandhi via letters).

In 1910, Tolstoy is still writing and riding horseback, and he is the most revered author of his time. He lives on a grand country estate and presides from a distance over a quasi-political cult/commune in which young adherents do farm labor while trying to adhere to tenets of Tolstoyan philosophy such as pacifism, social equality, vegetarianism and celibacy – all rules Tolstoy personally admits difficulty in adhering to.

It’s clear in this retelling of Tolstoy’s life, that the first and most important moon around this planet was his wife Sofya, a woman who was by his side during the writing of Anna Karenina and who transcribed War and Peace six times by hand. She’s stood by and watched in lonely horror and isolation as his new philosophies and increased fame has pulled her husband further away from her. (They were celebrities in their time and the paparazzi stalked them just like they stalk celebrities today).

Tolstoy loves his wife, but she is a devotee of Italian opera and is melodramatic herself. She has given her husband 13 children in their 48-year marriage. Sofya struggles to hold on to the work of her life – Tolstoy and her marriage. She tries to recapture the romance and fire of their earlier years of marriage, but doesn’t succeed very often.

Meanwhile, the abrasive Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) wants Tolstoy to leave his works to the Russian people and when he’s not bending the author’s ear to such an end, he’s hiring a young man named Valentin (James McAvoy) to infiltrate the group of followers circling the legend known as Tolstoyans and report back on the private conversations between Leo and Sofya. Sofya resents Chertkov – justifiably so. Chertkov seems a picture-perfect Communist-in-training. He tells Valentin that Sofya is very dangerous.

The film has received two Oscar nods: Christopher Plummer , for Supporting Actor and Helen Mirren for Leading Actress. Both of them deliver outstanding performances and could certainly win. James McAvoy is also wonderful as Valentin and Anne-Marie Duff is cute and spunky as Sasha.

The movie was written and directed by Michael Hoffman, based on the novel by Jay Parini.

The Last Station costars: 
Sofya – Helen Mirren
Tolstoy – Christopher Plummer
Chertkov – Paul Giamatti
Valentin – James McAvoy
Sasha – Anne-Marie Duff
Masha – Kerry Condon
Dushan – John Sessions
Sergeyenko – Patrick Kennedy

Shot on location in Germany, the film and costumes are gorgeous. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Quinn.

About Leo Tolstoy (Count Lev Nikolayevich):  A Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist fiction. He is also the author of popular novellas such as Hadji Murad and The Death of Ivan Ilyich.  Tolstoy’s earliest works, the autobiographical novels Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), tell of a rich landowner’s son and his slow realization of the chasm between himself and his peasants. Though he later rejected them as sentimental, a great deal of Tolstoy’s own life is revealed. They retain their relevance as accounts of the universal story of growing up.

The Young Victoria is a wonderful film. The cinematography is gorgeous and the pace and emotional tone of the film are exquisite.

French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallee begins with Victoria’s 1819 birth, then focuses on two storylines: the new queen’s declaration of independence from her mother; and her romance with her first cousin, Prince Albert (Rupert Friend).

Some of you may remember that in 1997, Judi Dench played Queen Victoria, Britain’s longest reigning monarch in history, during her later years; the story revolving around her relationship with manservant John Brown. Currently, The Young Victoria features the outstanding Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada) as the Queen during the first years of her reign, including her romance and relationship with husband Prince Albert (Rupert Friend.)

The movie tells the story of the short, but crucial first few years of Victoria’s 63-year reign. As King William IV (an amusingly impolitic Jim Broadbent) dodders toward the grave, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) plans a regency so she can control her teenage daughter when she becomes queen. The king, who’s Victoria’s uncle, loves the girl as much as he loathes her mother and her top adviser, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong, who plays another sort of Victorian knave in Sherlock Holmes).

Although just 18 when crowned in 1837, Victoria refuses the regency, spurning her mother and Conroy’s guidance. For political counsel, she relies instead on the prime minister, Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany), and enjoys the time she spends with Albert, who’s been sent from Saxony by their uncle, Belgium’s King Leopold (Thomas Kretschmann), to sway Victoria toward support for Leopold’s ambitions.

During these early years, Melbourne and his party were falling out of favor in Parliament and his attempts to keep some kind of power by imposing the wives of his party members onto the Royal Household was viewed negatively by the public.

Her connection to Melbourne caused Victoria to be strongly disliked by the public during her early reign, but much of this dislike seemed to be forgotten when Victoria married Prince Albert. (Everyone loves a good romance – even in the 1800s!) The movie focuses much of its story on their courtship/romance which was, in part, arranged by Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold of Belgium. Victoria was wary of marriage at first, fearing that a husband would want to rule her, but Albert’s charms and his proclamation that she should marry someone who would want to rule with her, finally won her over.  And, Melbourne informs the queen that the reform-minded Albert is “a good man,” and advises her to “let him share your work.” An end note reports that the queen and her prince consort reigned together for 20 years. (As history buffs probably know, Albert died at 42, while the sturdy Victoria lived to 81. They had 9 children together!)

Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend are fantastic in their roles. Blunt does an excellent job of balancing the exuberance of Victoria’s youth with the seriousness of her station. It’s part of her vivaciousness which makes the romance with Rupert Friend’s Prince Albert all the more interesting and endearing. I would have enjoyed seeing more of the romance and less of the politics.

Co-produced by Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York — and featuring a cameo by her daughter, Princess Beatrice — the film is wonderful. You will enjoy it, I promise!

From left to right: Nicholas Hoult, Tom Ford, Colin Firth and Matthew Goode

This movie is absolutely wonderful. Heartfelt, brilliant, sensitive and beautiful. I loved it so much, I saw it twice. Colin Firth should be nominated for an Oscar for his role as George Falconer in A Single Man.

The story is simple; the complex layers of emotion are not. In 1962, George 52 years old, is a Briton who transplanted to L.A. There, he has been an English professor for years. George is also gay at a time – the early ’60s – when being open about such things wasn’t commonplace. Gay men and women were “invisible” to the rest of the world. No one talked about it. The man George loves, Jim (Matthew Goode), has died, sending him first into depression and then on a mission to simply end it all.

Matthew Goode

Our tragedy actually begins on the day George has decided will be his last. George was in a 16-year relationship with his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), until Jim died in a car accident eight months earlier. The agony took hold at once: As he received the horrible news from a member of Jim’s family, he was told the funeral was for family only.

Fashion designer Tom Ford, who made a name as the glamour guy at Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and now with his own label, has constructed an impressive directing debut out of Christopher Isherwood’s dark novel. A character study is a good fit, giving Ford the chance to use what he knows about staging, which is considerable. Life and death are equally beautiful, equally seductive, as are the sets, the faces, the cars and the clothes of the 60s, which Ford designed himself. Everything on-screen mirrors the time “spot on.” No detail is random, whether the clocks that tick as George moves through his final day, the people he encounters, the vending machines, the burial suit meticulously laid out with “a Windsor knot” noted on the card placed over the tie.

This is a love story and whether you’re heterosexual, bisexual, gay or whatever – you will feel the depth of emotion in this film. You will cry for Jim and George – watching the beauty of love unfold on the screen like a paintbrush stroking colors and images onto a canvass. Director of Photography is Eduard Grau and he does a beautiful job. The film begins and ends with a kiss, gentle and chaste, setting a tone that will stay. (Even Jim’s death is beautiful and forlorn, exhibiting the kind of loneliness and pain that is almost too much to bear.) As a line in the movie points out, “Sometimes, awful things have their own kind of beauty.”

Since Jim’s death, George has walked through what’s left of his life. He lives in a beautiful “glass house” in Santa Monica and tries to teach literature to uninterested students; he waves at the neighbors next door while despising their shallowness. He lectures to his indifferent students, speaking in code about the hatred of minorities. He declines the advances of a flirtatious Spanish gay hustler. He shares cocktails and old jokes with a fellow Brit, Charley (Julianne Moore), a washed up divorcee with whom George once had a brief affair. She’s really his only true friend and even she doesn’t fully understand that gay relationships are “real” relationships. And at the end of the day, in the same beachfront bar where he met Jim, George finds himself pursued by an admiring, flirtatious and young student (Nicholas Hoult, the kid in About a Boy, who has grown into a blue-eyed beauty). Ford and co-writer David Scearce have added an element of suspense you won’t find in Isherwood’s book: George’s intention to commit suicide before day’s end.

George goes through the steps of tidying up his affairs before putting a revolver in his mouth and relieving the pain. Yet, judging by an almost-farcical scene of false starts, perhaps George is still a long way from the brink.

Ford’s movie, like the novel, is an inner journey, weaving pungent memories into the everyday details of George’s life. A Single Man derives its power from Firth’s coiled performance. In black-rimmed glasses that make him look like Nelson Rockefeller or Michael Caine, Firth is wonderful as a reserved professor who is concealing unbearable anguish and pain, without the emotional outbursts that most actors would need to make the point.

Firth’s work should earn him an Oscar nomination. He was already nominated for a Golden Globe, which went to Jeff Bridges instead. Firth should have won it. He is remarkable. His staunchest fans, though, will probably continue to pine for a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.

Go see A Single Man today. It will teach you about love and tolerance and maybe, even, make you a better person.