Apparently there is such a thing as "too good" when it comes to award consideration. In a year when Sandra Bullock is collecting acting awards hand over fist, Helen Mirren's gorgeously impassioned performance as Sofya Tolstoy is being all but ignored. Coming off her 2007 win for "The Queen" it seems like Mirren has found herself in the same predicament that Meryl Streep has bravely endured all these years--churning out such powerful performances with such consistency that they become expected rather than celebrated.
 
It's a shame, because "The Last Station" is a stunning showpiece for Mirren and a performance of this caliber would be a career maker for anyone else. In the film she plays the wife of Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer in his first Academy Award nominated role) in the final months of his life. After 48 years of marriage, Sofya Tolstoy finds that her husband belongs more to the people than he does to herself, and she launches a desparate campaign to cling to the love they share as she finds herself losing him (and his legacy) to the ideological movement he has created.

James McAvoy plays Valentin Bulgakov, a young secretary who one of Tolstoy's followers and collaborators has hired to keep an eye on Sofya and limit her progress. McAvoy has carved a strange niche for himself by consistently being the least interesting part of any movie he makes. In 2006, he played the everyman against whom the powerful presence of Idi Amin was balanced and reflected in "The Last King of Scotland". In "The Last Station" he fills a similar role, giving the viewer a conduit through which he/she sees the Tolstoys. But the subplots involving Valentin Bulgakov (how will he side? will he find love?) function as little more than filler. The movie is at its most interesting when Mirren and Plummer are onscreen. They are explosive, tragic, touching, and tender. This is where the film's power resides, and the result is a deeply engaging treatise on the conflict between a life of the heart and a life of the mind.

-Lucy Jones