Russian novelist Lev Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) and his wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren), share a rare happy moment in The Last Station. (Stephan Rabold/Sony Pictures Classics)It’s a bumper weekend for biopics, with two “great man” movies opening: Creation, about the British scientist Charles Darwin, and The Last Station, about the Russian novelist Leo (a.k.a. Lev) Tolstoy. Both films also share an emphasis on the strained marriages of their subjects during the latter days of their lives. However, the friction between Darwin and his devoted wife Emma was nothing like the domestic nightmare of the aging, aristocratic Tolstoys.

It’s 1910 on the Tolstoys’ Russian estate, Yasnaya Polyana, and Count Lev (Christopher Plummer) and Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren) are going at it hammer and tongs. Lev, 82, has abandoned novel writing in favour of an ascetic life of pacifism, vegetarianism and non-materialism. Sofya, his wife of 48 years, is in despair as he prepares to sign a will giving away his land and copyrights to the people. Driving a wedge between the pair is Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), Tolstoy’s chief disciple and founder of the Tolstoyan movement, who wrestles with the countess for influence over her husband.

As the Count and Countess Tolstoy, Plummer and Mirren are wonderful – a lion and lioness in winter, by turns mauling and nuzzling each other.

Making things worse, the Tolstoys’ marital war is playing out in the glare of celebrity. By the end of his life, Tolstoy was an international literary star and writer-director Michael Hoffman has fun with the idea of Lev and Sofya as a kind of 19th-century Russian Brangelina. The author of War and Peace can’t utter a word without one of his sycophants scribbling it down. A disgusted Sofya reads the latest gossip about their marriage in the papers. A swarm of cameramen continually lie in wait at the estate’s entrance, like proto-paparazzi, ready to photograph the Tolstoys the moment they appear.

Their discord is seen mostly through the wide eyes of Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), an eager young Tolstoyan recruited by Chertkov to act as Tolstoy’s personal secretary. Chertkov has also instructed him to keep a diary of life at Yasnaya Polyana. However, no sooner has Bulgakov arrived at the estate when the countess swoops in and attempts to make him her confidante as well – giving the young man a second diary to record what she sees as the true story.

The film is based on Jay Parini’s 1990 novel, which in turn drew on the many real diaries and memoirs dealing with Tolstoy’s last days. (It seems everybody at Yasnaya Polyana was writing. By felicitous coincidence, a new English translation of Sofya Tolstoy's diaries has just been published.) As portrayed here, the Tolstoys' crumbling marriage is a tragicomedy: Mirren’s Sofya is a neurotic drama queen who eavesdrops from balconies, fires off guns and threatens to hurl herself under a railway carriage like her husband’s fictional heroine, Anna Karenina. (“You don’t need a husband,” Plummer’s Tolstoy tells her, “you need a Greek chorus!”) Yet her desperate antics are fueled in part by an enduring love for Lev, with whom she was once a creative as well as life partner, and whom she now sees, in his twilight years, drifting away.

As played by Plummer, Tolstoy too is a mix of the endearing and exasperating. Absent-mindedly killing a mosquito, or fondly reminiscing about the carnal adventures of his youth, he admits that he’s not a very good Tolstoyan himself. But he remains stubborn in his beliefs, a grumpy sage who will brook no dissent.

Plummer and Mirren are wonderful – a lion and lioness in winter, by turns mauling and nuzzling each other. Plummer, just seen hamming it up in Terry Gilliam’s silly The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, dials things down here and shows us again why he’s one of the great actors. As majestic as a gnarled old oak, his Tolstoy at times twinkles with robust playfulness, at other times lapses into the cold, closed-off state of an old man facing his death. Plummer also bears a genuine resemblance to the elderly Tolstoy, enhanced here by a long grey patriarch/peasant beard. (The count liked to affect the look and clothing of a simple peasant – and at one point Mirren’s Sofya calls him on it.)

Mirren, a perfect match for Plummer, gives her most substantial big-screen performance since she won an Oscar for The Queen. Her shameless Sofya Tolstoy is the polar opposite of her ice-encrusted Queen Elizabeth II, yet the countess maintains an odd dignity even in her most slapstick moments.

Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) spends his final days on his family estate in The Last Station. (Stephan Rabold/Sony Pictures Classics) Like Mirren, Giamatti paints his character with comic touches – Chertkov the ostensible anti-materialist is a well-fed dandy who wears perfume and is continually waxing his moustaches. Giamatti is too skilled an actor, however, to just make his character a hypocritical opportunist; by the end, we get a sense that, whatever his failings, Chertkov truly loves his guru Tolstoy.

McAvoy, of Atonement fame, is saddled with the role of the naïve idealist and plays it with zest. His guileless Bulgakov is a boyish, over-eager virgin, who sneezes when he gets nervous – a character trait straight out of a 19th-century Russian novel. A spirited Kerry Condon co-stars as Masha, the more worldly Tolstoyan who assails his shaky vow of chastity.

American filmmaker Hoffman, whose previous work includes the 1999 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the under-rated rom-com One Fine Day, is a conventional director, but he has a nice eye for detail and he knows how to get the best out of his actors. His experience with comedy also informs this picture. For a movie about a great man’s last days, The Last Station is unexpectedly lively, almost as rich and tempestuous as one of Tolstoy’s own novels.

Lovers of his books will be struck in particular by a poignant scene midway through the film, when Tolstoy fondly recalls to Bulgakov how, as a young man, he wooed the teenage Sofya – an event the author later recreated as the Kitty-Levin courtship in Anna Karenina. Anyone who has read that unparalleled description of romantic ecstasy can only be saddened by the way the Tolstoys’ long marriage finally ended – more in war than peace.

The Last Station opens in Toronto on Jan. 22; Vancouver on Jan. 29; Montreal and Ottawa on Feb. 12; Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Victoria and Winnipeg on Feb. 26.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.