The film battles two major obstacles and isn't quite successful at either. First, we have the old how to impose structure on a true story. Also, how to dramatize philosophical ideas. In a way, they impinge on each other.
We've got Leo Tolstoy -- played with subtlety and a replusive charm by Christopher Plummer -- at the end of his life. The world-famous novelist, revered and adored by The People, await and dread his passing. Some, many have adopted the tenets of Tolstoyans, i.e. a Christlike life of abstinence and labour.
Two engines drive the story, one of which pits Paul Giametti's scheming and morally righteous Chertkov against Helen Mirren's Countess Tolstoy. She, who never stops loving the husband to whom she's borne 13 children, clings to the ordered, sweet-smelling life of the past underpinned by the Russian Orthadox religion. The dynamic revolves around who is entitled to the great man's estates and copyrights upon his death.
The other narrative strand arrives in the form of James McAvoy as future writer Valentin Bulgakov, here a callow naif determined to serve Tolstoy's cause ... if he can figure out what it is.
As it must have in life, Bulgakov's education tests his loyalties. It also tries to make the film focus on him, which in the end serves neither story. The schism prevents us from any real points of identification, with little but a simplistic understanding of Tolstoy's ideas.
There are wonderful moments, especially between Plummer and Mirren, and Giametti proves again he owns a certain territory of misplaced menace. But it's not enough.
