What I Think About Movies I've Seen

Christopher Plummer plays Leo Tolstoy near the end of his life. He has completed his masterpieces, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and has moved on to a much different kind of writing in which he advocates passive resistance and an end to private property. He is very beloved, and many people have embraced his ideals. A commune has formed near his home, and Vladimir Chertkov (played by Paul Giamatti) is one Tolstoy's dearest friends and heavily influences its development, although he his initially being held under house arrest and therefore hires Valentin (James McAvoy) to act as Tolstoy's assistant and report to him everything that happens. He's particularly concerned about Tolstoy's wife Sofya (Helen Mirren) because she doesn't completely share all of her husband's ideals and wants to ensure that she doesn't damage the movement. We soon find that while it is true that Leo and Sofya don't see eye-to-eye on many things, it is also evident that Chertkov has a pretty significant role in sculpting the message portrayed at the commune and the ideals that they embrace aren't always shared by Tolstoy himself.

This was an excellent movie. The acting was top-notch across the board, the characters had quite a bit of depth, and the story was very compelling. It was wonderful to see the range that Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren brought to their characters and how easily it was for them to feel love for them, then hate, then sympathy, while in contrast Giamatti's Chertkov was easy to dislike for the entire film. I did find it a bit unusual that this very Russian story was portrayed by English-speaking people with British accents, but that's probably for the best because I think that the inflection and range of emotion wouldn't have been conveyed as well in Russian with subtitles or in English with Russian accents.