cshiira-681-591495 Reviews

Princess Kaiulani (2009)

The wayward princess

[22 May 2010]

Burt Lancaster was not an Indian, but the English/Irish actor played a Potawatomi in Max Steiner's "Jim Thorpe: All-American" and one of Geronimo's tribesman in Robert Aldrich's "Apache". Paul Muni had no Chinese blood. Susan Kohner had no black blood. Marlon Brando had no Okinawan blood. In retrospect, now that the cinema is well-represented by all walks of life, such racial performances, however well-meaning, instantly dates the film. Blood is important, but it doesn't necessarily have to make or break the movie if the filmmaker employs red-face(or black-face, or yellow-face) simply as a means to an end(the productions of "The Good Earth", "Imitation of Life", and "The Teahouse of the August Moon" would not have been mad without the prevailing film industry's political incorrect casting practices), in which the masquerading actors aren't consciously foregrounding their appropriated ethnic impersonation through grotesque minstrelism(for starters, Mickey Rooney's take on the Japanese in Blake Edwards' "Breakfast at Tiffany's"). Nowadays, if a minority race gets misrepresented, it's less a matter of outright racism, but rather, a marketability concern, which is best exemplified by the casting of non-Japanese actresses Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh in "Memoirs of a Geisha". Likewise, "Princess Kaiulani", a sugar-coated chronicling of the Hawaiian royal who, due to American intervention, was denied the chance to rule her island nation, would never have been financed with a "Hapa"(a Hawaiian with Caucasian blood). It's a knee-jerk reaction to call this film racist, because the overriding flaw of "Princess Kaiulani" has nothing to do with Q'orianka Kilcher's Peruvian/Spanish background; it's the performance that the filmmaker coaxes out of her, which doesn't clearly delineate a resolute anti-colonization stance. That's because the star of Terrence Malick's "The New World", as Kaiulani, behaves more like her oppressors, than the native Hawaiians she professes to love.

By all accounts, Princess Kaiulani was not a coward, so the historical inaccuracy of a colonialist-led insurgency(during a lighting ceremony which introduced electricity to Honolulu) as being the catalyst for her overseas voyage to England, could be construed as an insult to the girl's legacy. Being non-Hawaiian is not the insult. But it's a forgivable offense(in the context of narrative film), since all biopics that depict the past rewrites itself for the sake of clarity and time compression. While in London, Kaiulani complies with Belle Epoque fashion(wide-shouldered blouse with muttonchop sleeves, cinched with a corset and wide belt to hug the waist), which wouldn't have been especially foreign to the princess, who wore European-style clothing back home, but Kilcher's assignation of the fairer "ali'i" suggests that the filmmaker decided against addressing the young woman's "other-ness". Although Kaiulani should look English, she shouldn't literally be a descendant of Queen Victoria, which is how Kilcher plays the princess, as a "barbarian" without the slightest trepidation about gaining entree into a wholly new culture. Kaiulani seems bereft of royal carriage, giggling and mugging for Clive(Shaun Evans), lost as she is in the throes of love, despite her consciousness(that's why the opening scene proves to be problematic) of the governmental tumult back home, having been a first-hand witness to the king's premier being taken hostage at gunpoint by the Hawaiian League before her hasty departure. This big romance dominates "Princess Kaiulani", at the expense of detail surrounding the fallout from the Bayonet Constitution that resulted in the reigning queen(Liliokulani) being ousted from her dismantled court. The film conjures up emotional uplift(big rabble-rousing speeches, an appointment with President Cleveland, the restoration of her title, purely symbolic) to obscure the tragedy that befell the native population, who had lost their land to the missionaries(a fact that gets lost in Kaiulani's small victory of restoring the Hawaiian people's right to vote), and lives(due to disease transmitted from the newly minted foreign landowners). Not enough is made ado about this drastic transference of power. Worst of all, despite Clive being in cahoots with his family to deceive Kaiulani(who should have known that a coup was in the making), she accepts the British gentleman with open arms at her seaside "coronation", going so far as kissing him in front of her people during their darkest hours. That is not how a dethroned monarch would act. "Princess Kaiulani" treats the loss of her personal happiness and kingdom as commiserating catastrophes.

Being ethnic for an ethnic role, in this case, Hawaiian, is not nearly as important as acting certifiably ethnic, a non-Hawaiian with an authentic spirit, which is what Kilcher lacks, as a result of he filmmaker's passive attitude towards colonization.

The Runaways (2010)

Barbarians at the sound-check

[15 May 2010]

Arguably, the funniest moment on the much-missed NBC sitcom "Arrested Development" was when Jason Bateman and Alia Shawkat(playing uncle and niece) performed a karaoke version of the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" at an office party without realizing how suggestive the lyrics were until it's too late("the thought of lovin' you is so exciting"). The scene works because there's nothing labored about this ill-fated song selection; it's an easy mistake to make, since aurally, the female-half of the Washington D.C. quartet sounds so innocuous, they could be singing about their love for God, or horses, or just about anything, but sex. Vocalists Taffy Danoff and Margot Chapman warbled come-ons like Stepford Wives, in deference to the men, the ones who were supposed to enjoy sex, while they, the ABBA fem-bots, give vocal performances that suggest they feel nothing. That's why a song like "Cherry Bomb" must have been so shocking to people not used to women, children actually, being aggressors with carnal knowledge, in which lead vocalist Cherie Curie(Dakota Fanning) leaves little to the imagination when she shouts "have you, grab you, 'til you're sore," like a proto-Liz Phair, or riot grrl of your choice. Despite the country being liberated by the sexual revolution, Curie's on-stage antics, by rock and roll standards, was still considered a "guy's move", as was Lita Ford's competent guitar solos. But true female empowerment would have to wait awhile, in which the foregrounding of a woman's musicianship over her sex appeal had never occurred to producer Kim Fowley(Michael Shannon), who had no qualms about arranging a softcore porn shoot for Currie with the Japanese press in her backyard. (Similarly, at the bequest of Malcolm McLaren, Annabelle Lwin would pose topless for the cover of the Bow Wow Wow album "Wild in the Country". And lest not we forget Brooke Shield's (still-)shocking nude scenes in Louis Malle's "Pretty Baby") Initially, Currie, who, the film suggests, lacks the rock and roll authority of a Joan Jett(Kristen Stewart), demurs at the impresario's blunt lyrics. Currie played the role of lolita, reluctantly, but grew into it once she got a real taste of rock and roll hedonism. "The Runaways", based on the Cherie Curie memoir "Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway", portrays the lead singer as being exploited by an industry predicated on putting women, just like the infamous Hustler magazine cover, through a meat grinder.

Appropriately enough, Cherie is compared to Linda Lovelace, the star of "Deep Throat", the 1972 adult film that borough pornography into the mainstream, which in all likelihood, paved the way for The Runaways to record on a major label(Mercury Records). (The film makes a case for the "porn-ification" of America taking place well-before Britney Spears was born.) Lita is furious with Cherie, referencing Lovelace in relation to her bandmate's photo spread, just before the band hits the stage for a stirring version of "Cherry Bomb", in which the lead guitarist reprimands the 16-year-old girl for undermining their music by flaunting her crotch around her west coast backyard. (The Runaways, even by today's standards, would cause a commotion.) But it's no wonder that The Runaways were big in Japan, a country whose women are infantilized by a culture that promotes a hyper-femininity that at times encourages a prolonged girlhood well into their late-twenties and beyond. In 1980, Lovelace wrote a national bestseller memoir called "Ordeal", an expose about the adult film industry, in which the actress claimed that her on-screen sexual exploits were performed against her will. Six years later, Lovelace came out with "Out of Bondage", where the anti-pornography advocate wrote that she "was forced into 'Deep Throat'", and was "the prisoner of a madman". Without a doubt, this madman in question which Lovelace alluded to must have been her former husband/manager Chuck Traynor. Like the "Deep Throat" star, The Runaways had a Svengali too, in the form of producer Kim Fowley, who refers to the band as his property, Cherie, in particular, a "prima donna" he instructs to think like a man. As Fowley indoctrinates Cherie in the finer points of being a sex object; at one point, lambasting his protégé for her "lack of rock and roll authority", this assembled piece of "jailbait" cheesecake takes it upon herself to bedeck her adolescent body in peepshow quality apparel, to Joan's dismay, and without Fowley's input. Unwittingly, "The Runaways" makes the case for Lovelace's naysayers that the porn star was indeed in control of her own sexuality. Even though we see Cherie, out of bondage, out from Fowley's control, late in the film, where she ends up working in a bakery, the Runaways' frontwoman, nevertheless, sets the stage for quasi-artists such as Madonna, whose self-promotion of her anatomical wares was made without any male encouragement.

Fish Tank (2009)

Fish out of water

[6 May 2010]

It's an incongruous sight, a white horse situated in a vacant lot, surrounded by the blight of urban decay; a white horse in Essex, and Mia(Kate Jarvis) at 15, a well-seasoned 15, wizened up from poverty, a broken family, and an unpromising future, tries to liberate the horse from the shambles of his shackled life, because she knows how the palomilla feels. They're kindred spirits those two, the girl and horse, both victims of circumstance: no sugarcubes for him, no sweetness in her life either. The horse, one year her senior, despite aging differently from his human counterpart, is definitely Mia's contemporary, in the sense that the girl's chronological age matters less than her emotional age, where fifteen, accelerated by the mean streets of inner-city England, can be measured in animal years.

"I'm not a bloody kid, you know!" Mia tells Connor(Michael Rappaport), her mother's new beau, who responds, "I know," when she shows up unexpectedly at his workplace. It's the film's turning point, a declaration that unsnarls the ambiguity behind Connor's previous interactions with Mia, which could be interpreted as either fatherly, or the overtures of a sexual predator. He touches both Mia, and her younger sister, but what kind of touch is it? With Tyler(Rebecca Griffiths), Connor engages the foul-mouthed lass(she says "c**t" with more authenticity than Chloe Grace Moretz in Matthew Vaughn's "Kick-Ass") in seemingly harmless horseplay, tickling the girl at their front door when she doesn't fork over "money for the gatekeeper". "Fish Tank" firmly establishes Connor as a "good guy"(one suspects, atypical from the girls' mother's other boyfriends), a father figure, a bedrock of surrogate parenting, so he gets the benefit of the doubt in his encounters with Mia that could be ascribed as sexual, if the moviegoer penciled the man as a pervert from the outset.

After a party, having fallen asleep in the wrong bed, with her drunken mother's consent, Connor carries Mia in his arms to her own bed, where he proceeds to take off the girl's shoes, and then pants, while she feigns sleep without protest, alarming the moviegoer with the possible sexual connotations made by the undressing, before we're rest assured by the man's corrective measure of covering up the girl's underwear and exposed legs with a blanket. The next day, during a "family" outing at a secret fishing spot overgrown with greenery, Connor has Mia jump on his back under the pretense of a cut foot. Prior to the minor scrape, both man and girl look like father and daughter as they conspire to catch a fish in the pond, while the mother Joanne(Kierston Wareing) and Tyler watch from the edge. The next time they meet, the moviegoer is less sure about Connor's intentions, as he cleans and bandages her untreated cut, with a temperament pitched uneasily between paternal and incestuous. Mia smiles for the first time. No doubt about it: he's flirting with her.

Mia, an aspiring dancer in the hip-hop mode, spots a flier posted outside an Internet cafe which advertises the need for female dancers, as "Fish Tank" makes allusions to Hollywood's recent slate of dance-oriented movies such as "You Got Served" and "Step Up", a shrewd move on the film's part because it puts Connor to the test, since the moviegoer suspects that the dancing is exotic. Instead of a warning, he equips Mia with his video camera so she can create a demonstration tape for the promoters. Shirtless and stinking of cologne, as Connor gives the camera to Mia, he suddenly pulls the girl over his lap and spanks her, perhaps out of sexual excitement over seeing her strip should the girl be in a sharing mood. Slowly, but surely, Connor's intentions to sleep with her becomes more pronounced, outweighing his self-deluded affectations of mentoring and nurturing her, especially when he makes eye-contact with Mia as he f*** her mother from behind a half-open door. What happens next is inevitable.

Disillusioned and defeated, Mia returns to her equine friend. He's dead, prompting the girl to leave Essex with his owner, because in another year in the "fish tank" might kill her too. From the backseat of a moving car, she's a fish out of water while waving goodbye to Tyler.

City Island (2009)

Fake empire

[5 May 2010]

The Rizzos live on the waterfront in a part of the Bronx that the the natives call City Island. Our narrator Frank Rizzo(Andy Garcia), a correctional officer with a Marlon Brando fixation, insists it's better to be a "clamdigger"(local resident) than a "mussel sucker"(an outsider), but the moviegoer senses that this long-held opinion of his is changing, since the filmmaker provides the moviegoer with visual cues which contradicts his civic pride. First of all, this volatile, sometimes downright dysfunctional family lives on a dead end street, denoted by a yellow sign overlooking the East River, the place where they hide the dead bodies. Enervated by his dead-end job as a "prison guard"(this labeling makes Frank testy), and the day-to-day grind of being a husband and father of two, Frank takes acting classes in the city because his dreams are too big for the island, too big for the house, even, as evidenced by the sight of Frank with his book about method acting while protruding through the roof. Frank hides the books and VHS tapes(of "The Fugitive Kind" and "A Streetcar Named Desire", not "Chocolate MILF 3") as if it was something shameful like porn, and it's this dislocation of sex which informs the moviegoer that his relationship with Molly(Emily Mortimer), his acting partner from the workshop, will be strictly a platonic one. If "City Island" has one major flaw, it's that the filmmaker uses a hoary TV sitcom trope, in which the wife thinks her husband is having an affair through some contrived misunderstanding. Of course, the wife uses sex as a weapon and retaliates. The performances by this laudable ensemble deserves better than such "Three's Company" shenanigans. As a result, "City Island" overreaches in its attempt for big laughs. (The subplot that involves the son with a fetish for chubby women is too indie for comfort, and the daughter who has to strip for her tuition feels old hat.) Its high spirits should have climaxed into something quieter, something more introspective. Frank feels like Terry Malloy, that's why he imitates Brando at his audition for the Martin Scorsese film. He feels like a "bum", that's the prison guard's worst secret, which is more comprehensive than his previously stated confession of having an illegitimate son. When the casting director plucks him out from the long line of acting hopefuls waiting for their chance to read, Frank must feel like Malloy in Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront", in which the ex-boxer is selected among his longshoreman peers to usher in the age of the unionized worker. Frank is no longer a clamdigger, or prison guard, or a man who had learned to live with lowered expectations. Now he's a contender.

The Ghost Writer (2010)

Ruth's candidate

[27 April 2010]

The ghost writer, don't feel sorry for the ghost writer: he has no scruples. He could change his mind and go home after he learns about the allegations of political impropriety facing the former British prime minister, but a quarter-million dollars is a quarter-million dollars. On the phone with his agent, both men are near televisions when the news breaks that Adam Lang(Pierce Brosnan) may be tried as a war criminal. There are numerous accounts that Lang approved the use of torture on Iraqi prisoners, but the news hardly registers on the ghost's face as he finishes his drink at the airport bar. For a princely sum, the ghost writer will board a plane with the expressed interest of collaborating with an immoral politician. By his own admission, politics isn't really his thing, which may be the very reason that he was chosen for the job. With a slight nod of the head by Lang's handler(Timothy Hutton), the publishing house editor(Jim Belushi) hands the lightweight scribe the plum job because it's assumed that this "ghost" won't haunt Lang with questions about the ongoing war. In due time, however, the unnamed scribe will experience some unforeseen permutations in his function as a ghostwriter, and make himself seen.

Situated in a sleepy New England town, the former prime minister hides from the world in an undisclosed compound, where the ghost meets up with the outgoing politician's small entourage. There's Amelia Bly(Kim Catrall), Lang's self-satisfied secretary and mistress, who treats her boss' manuscript like it was a holy text, and then there's Ruth Lang(Olivia Williams), the long-suffering wife, who knows the book is full of unholy lies. The prime minister represents different things to both women, in which Amelia sees Lang as not being capable of any wrongdoing, a god, while Ruth understands all to well that her husband is merely a man, made, as it turns out, in her own image. The ghost, meanwhile, has private discussions with Lang about his memoirs, in the midst of the turmoil that extends beyond what the politician is willing to share between the covers. When the press descends on the same motel lodgings as the ghost, he moves into the compound, and becomes, in Amelia's own words: "One of us." The ghost is apolitical, but that's what Leni Riefenstahl said, in her defense after the world learned the whole truth about Adolph Hitler; the ghost is a bad ghost, because he helps Lang haunt both sides of the Atlantic, instead of scaring the subject with questions about his politics. But a ghost can change. Staying in his dead predecessor's room, the stealth writer discovers some key documents that initiates the ghost's reinvention from a hack scribe to an investigative journalist. The ghost is freed from the confines of the mimeographed pages and into the real world where he can do some real haunting, on the living, rather than on the vestiges of dead tree bark.

Finally, at the book party, to commemorate the publication of, as it turns out, the late politician's memoirs, the ghost writer makes himself corporeal by constructing a chain-rattling sentence from found words in the manuscript that scares the living daylights out of the reader. The last words that the ghost will ever write are his own.

Greenberg (2010)

The new kids of America

[10 April 2010]

Florence Marr(Greta Gerwig) wasn't alive when singer/songwriter Albert Hammond had a top five hit with "It Never Rains...". She might know the song, as well as the "Saturday Night Fever" smash "Disco Inferno", but not in the manner that Roger(Ben Stiller) knows it. To the older man, at least twelve years her senior, the music of the seventies, despite being ancient history, still can sound contemporary, which is what happens to the titular character in the kitchen as the 1972 song plays on his IPOD. In a fit of nostalgia, for a little while, the IPOD could be an AM/FM radio to Roger, who forgets how old he is: his early forties, an age in which he should be married with children, but instead he's making awkward small talk with a young woman who is not his contemporary. To Florence, the song is kitschy, which Roger apprehends suddenly when she brings the outpatient back from his time-travelling by her failure to abet the man's reminiscing with an affirmative rejoinder about the distant past. Florence, and her generation, doesn't share the same life experiences as Roger, which is what "Greenberg" is all about: the shock of growing old; the shock of so many birthdays. He tells Florence, "It was before your time." Elvis Costello once asked, "Will you still love a man out of time?"(from the 1982 album "Imperial Bedroom"), which is the question that Roger probably doesn't want to ask Florence, so he's mean to her. Back in his heyday, Roger was the frontman of a rock band on the cusp of signing with a major label, but his indie sensibilities got the better of him and botched the deal for he and his bandmates. Back in town after his stint in a mental hospital, Greenberg is like Peter Pan, still a child, while his friends grew up to become productive members of society: adults with adult responsibilities. Eric(Mark Duplass) is rich, but still resents the fact that Roger made a unilateral decision on the band's career without his, or Ivan's input. Roger's best friend, played by Rhys Ifans, a potential single dad, tries to pick up where their friendship left off, but it becomes painfully clear that they have nothing left in common. Roger loathes aging. He blows up at the his former co-writing partner at a Mexican restaurant when the employees come to their table with a birthday greeting. It's no wonder that Roger gravitates toward Florence. He's rudderless; she's rudderless. Both of them are lost. But it's okay for her to be lost. She's young. On their first "date", Florence loses interest during Roger's attempt at pleasuring her, so he stops and excuses himself to the bathroom. In the mirror, Roger, probably for the first time, sees an old man staring back at him. He tries to get back together with his old girlfriend, because Florence has dreams: she's an aspiring singer-songwriter, while Beth, in his estimation, has lowered expectations(a divorced mother with two children), and doesn't have any dreams left in her. Although Roger loves Florence, he hates the generation that she belongs to. On their second "date", Florence reminds him of why he detests younger people, as his younger brother's assistant recounts the night that she and Gina(her best friend) picked up two guys and brought them back home for a bout of casual sex. He blows up and walks out of her apartment. "Greenberg" is about the new generation gap that exists between Generation X and "the kids these days".

In a lacerating monologue directed toward a small circle of young people at a party thrown by his younger brother's daughter, Roger describes today's youth as being "mean". In the same manner that Cameron Crowe repositioned the seventies as the new fifties in "Almost Famous"(through his use of "The Chipmunk Song" during the opening sequence), this filmmaker makes a case for the eighties as being an era of innocence, too. The kids of America scare him. But then there's Florence. Played by mumblecore mainstay Greta Gerwig, the star of "Hannah Takes the Stairs" smiles and waves at motorists who allow her to change lanes, and proves to Roger throughout the course of "Greenberg" that she's the exception to his rule. In spite of her exposure to Facebook, Korn, and Internet porn, all that technology and bad popular culture didn't corrupt her DNA, which was dispositioned towards being a timeless being, the perfect companion for a man out of time.

Chloe (2009)

Hairpin

[1 April 2010]

The professor may, or may not, be a shameless womanizer, bedding down graduate students, waitresses, and any pretty young thing that moves. As David(Liam Neeson) calls his wife from outside a restaurant, you see a young girl in the landscape, waiting patiently for the much older man to join her, while he explains about his botched flight plans, which in return, botches Catherine's surprise birthday plans for her husband. The young girl is blurry, out of focus, because the filmmaker leaves their night outing open for interpretation. In a prior scene, the same young girl had invited the professor to a late dinner with some other students after class. Are these collegians ensconced within the eatery ordering food and drink while David talks to Catherine(Catherine) on his cell-phone, or is this an intimate dinner for two? It's appropriate that the filmmaker keeps the young girl in soft focus. We don't know what she means to David. The filmmaker is coy. Catherine, a gynecologist, intercepts a text message on David's cell the very next morning which reads: "Thanks for last night. Miranda." Thanks for what, exactly? That's what Catherine wants to find out, so she hires Chloe(Amanda Seyfried), a high-priced call girl, to seduce David and report back to her with all the naughty details. Chloe is thorough, but that's okay, because she's talking to a medical professional, a woman who deals with sex on a daily basis in clinical terms. Like any gynecologist, Catherine must de-eroticize the vagina, and the vagina's adventures, for the sake of proper bedside manner. When Chloe talks about her husband's erection, it's just like being at work. Besides, she's straight. Right?

Following a blow-by-blow account of an encounter between Chloe and her husband in a botanical garden at their meeting place, the prostitute falls off her bicycle, and Catherine, who is old enough to be the girl's mother, who has a son just about Chloe's age, comes to her aid. Although the gynecologist stares at vaginas all day, it's in a maternal capacity that she tends to Chloe's cut and bruised knee. This dynamic first showed up in an earlier scene, where Catherine hears Chloe crying in the next bathroom stall and hands the distressed girl some toilet paper squares. During the hand-off beneath the divider, we see the contrast in hands: one hand is ravaged by wrinkles, while the other hand is smooth as a baby's bottom. Unlike her philandering husband, Catherine knows there are limits. So we think. In the next scene, after she bandages Chloe's boo-boo, the doctor surprises us; she masturbates in the shower, using Chloe's graphic description of her afternoon delight with David as pornography. More surprisingly, the gynecologist, we learn in retrospect, doesn't insert herself in Chloe's position while the prostitute recounts her escapades with her husband; it's David she stands in for during her autoerotic feat of lust.

"Chloe" sets the moviegoer up with a MacGuffin concerning the professor's supposed secret life to bolster the rhetoric of a fallible narrator(Chloe). She's a liar, just like the filmmaker, but exactly what is the latter liar fibbing about? Does he diagetically protect David by excising his affairs from our eyes? Because of the filmmaker's pedigree, the ending, which resembles something you might see on late-night cable, is so tacky, you need to read the melodramatic elements as satire. It's cut from the same cloth as Jane Campion's "In the Cut", in which an auteur tackles a more commercial production by going through the genre's motions with a reconstructive eye. For starters, "Chloe" could be construed as a corrective take on the killer lesbian criticism that surrounded Paul Verhoeven's "Basic Instinct". Chloe is no killer; she kills herself, and the prostitute equips herself with a hairpin, not an icepick.

The Last Station (2009)

Yoko Bolsheviko tried, but couldn't break up the band

[10 March 2010]

The Countess Sofya(Helen Mirren) gave birth to thirteen children, none, by all accounts, were products of immaculate conception, yet Leo Tolstoy(Christopher Plummer), the author of "Anna Karenia" and "War and Peace", had the chutzpah to start a religion that promoted celibacy. Not only was the countess a prolific baby-maker, she collaborated with her husband in the capacity as an editor, proof-reading everything he wrote like a critic, not a sycophant. And most daunting of all, Sofya transcribed six drafts of that tome of tomes, "War and Peace", with a mere pen. She was old, Tolstoy was even older; they were supposed to enjoy the fruits of their labor, but then the prodigious thinker thought too hard and started a cult, in which Tolstoyan dogma, at its behest, promoted the relinquishing of worldly possessions. To Sofya's chagrin, she and love itself seemed to have been on Tolstoy's checklist of things being itemized for disposal. Unbeknownst to the countess, on a crisp, summer afternoon in the woodlands, Tolstoy committed a crime against their marriage with one stroke of a pen, which delivered his life's work to the public domain. "The Last Station" challenges the moviegoer's notions about the sanctity of religion, when it doesn't just create international wars, but domestic wars, as well, between a husband and wife who love each other, but share opposing ideologies. For the woman who risked post-natal complications after childhood and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Tolstoy shows total disregard for her sacrifices, in a scene where the arch-ideologue replaces Sofya's picture on the wall with one of Vladimir Cherktov(Paul Giamatti), a Tolstoyan guru. It's madness. The Countess Sofya Tolstaya, his wife, is real, flesh and blood, but Tolstoy shows more reverence for something that he made up, and his co-conspirator, an arbiter of Tolstoy's legacy with a pedigree that hardly stands up next to the wife and mother of, let me repeat this, thirteen children! On Tolstoy's deathbed, after he departs from the proto-hippie commune he started back home at his Yasnya Polyana estate(the physical relationship between Valentin(James McEvoy) and Masha(Kerry Condon) demonstrates the impracticality of the Tolstoyan ideal; the self-denial of love), the countess apologizes for her "wickedness", her "badness", which to me, strikes a misogynistic note because it plays to the opinion of the pious moviegoer that Sofya's petition against her husband's philanthropy was based solely on greed for book royalties. "The Last Station" suggests that Sofya drove her husband to a premature grave, forcing the old man on an arduous journey via train in order to flee his "crazy" wife, despite being in a state of declining health. Her apology obscures the fact that its the the Tolstoyan lifestyle, religion itself, with all its arbitrary rules and regulations, which is crazy.