Notes on Adaptation - "The Last Station"

Writer/director Michael Hoffman takes on Tolstoy in The Last Station, which opened in Los Angeles and New York on January 15. The film, which Hoffman adapted from the novel by Jay Parini, has already received multiple nominations; the film's 5 Film Independent Spirit Award nods include Best Feature, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. The screenplay for The Last Station is being published by Newmarket Press in February, and some of this article is excerpted from the book's intro. In it, Hoffman talks about his relationship with the book and some of the challenges of adapting a story taken from real life.

"I believe it was Francois Truffaut who said second-rate books make better films than first-rate ones," Hoffman says. "That's a problem because Jay Parini's novel, The Last Station, is a first-rate book. A moving, complex record of the remarkable events of the final year in the life of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, many of its most powerful effects are literary and poetic. This complicates adaptation, which in some elemental way is a process of translation. The screenwriter must try to find cinematic (or at the least dramatic) equivalents to the literary language of the original. The more complex the literary devices, the more purely literary they are, the more difficult the task. For that reason (among others), it's trickier to adapt Finnegans Wake than a Tom Clancy novel."

Jay’s novel is narrated from five points of view. Tolstoy’s isn’t one of them. We hear his voice only in short passages from his letters, diaries, and published writings. The device succeeds in the novel, but movies are much more exacting when it comes to questions of point of view. Someone once said to me “Theater is about a voice. Cinema is about an eye.” Emotional information gets organized and transferred through a protagonist’s view of the events of the story. The decision to tell the story through Valentin Bulgakov (played by James McAvoy), a young man who came to Yasnaya Polyana to serve as Tolstoy’s private secretary during the last year of his life, gave me a particularly helpful window in on the events of the story. Valentin knows almost nothing of the byzantine goings on at the house. This is useful because he needs the same information the audience needs to understand the situation. His curiosity provides cover for a relatively heavy load of exposition. As he gains awareness, his opinion changes and ours changes with it. Many viewers feel they’ve watched a story about Tolstoy and his wife Sofya. In truth, it’s the sentimental education of Valentin that provides the structural bones of the screenplay and McAvoy’s subtle, funny, committed performance that makes the film work.

I suppose you also look for the point of intersection between the material and your own experience. I first read Jay’s book when it was published in 1990. It touched off a flurry of reading - Anna Karenina again, two big Tolstoy bios - but I can’t say I understood it as a film. I picked it up again in 2004 for no very good reason and, before I’d read half of it, was already constructing sequences of a screenplay in my head. When I read the book the first time, I was single. By 2004, I’d been with my partner, Samantha Silva, for more than ten years. I was no more or less interested in Tolstoy, but I had become extremely interested in the existential problem of marriage. I saw in the novel a story I wanted to tell about our great loves and marriages, the relationships that create us and destroy us and create us again, about the pain and the awkwardness and the communion and devotion, about the secret codes and languages that develop between people who’ve seen too much of each other. Sam refers to the film as "Art imitates wife."

The excellent thing about achieving such clarity of intention is that it becomes a beacon throughout the writing process. On one hand, it’s limiting, even reductive. Jay’s novel is much richer than the film and explores many more themes. The form gives him the space to do that. The screenplay is limited, but like a good sonnet, the limitations of the form can aid in creating greater emotional intensity.

Then there’s the structure. One of the most challenging tasks in the adaptation process is the successful application of dramatic structure to the material of the novel. Again, the best guide you can have is clear knowledge of the story you want to tell. That knowledge will define for you everything from the shape of the sequences to the center of the most crucial scenes. It will guide you in the great task of emphasis and selection, the essence of all art. It will get you home in one piece.

What good is a biopic? Not much I’d say unless you would gladly tell the same story if it weren’t factual. The traditional biopic has a lot to answer for. Too many of them are made of a random string of events that we watch only because they are (or, at least, purport to be) things that happened to a famous person. Maybe that’s interesting, but it’s not a story. I’m for Amadeus. I’m happy it’s about Mozart and Salieri, but much happier that it’s a compelling tale that knows in every moment what it’s about… the existential agony of mediocrity in the face of undeserved genius. I think our loyalty as storytellers is to truth rather than fact.

Still, throughout the entire writing process, I found myself struggling with my obligation to the facts of Tolstoy’s life. What debt did I owe to what really happened? In many cases, it was easy. Whole episodes could be lifted because they made for great drama with almost no manipulation. You would have had to be a genius to invent them. My challenge here was simply to get out of my own way. There was another order of problem that caused me no concern: questions of time compression and the rearrangement of the chronology of events. That all seemed fair game. One of the areas that concerned me: Sofya Tolstoy was an extreme personality. Jay’s novel chronicles incident after incident that illustrate her outlandish behavior. In early drafts of the screenplay, I used a lot more of it, because, moment to moment, it was entertaining. When I’d read over these drafts, however, they’d feel flat. It was by subtracting some of her extremity that she became believable and the conflict between her and her husband compelling. The story demanded a kind of even-handedness. Though the facts didn’t necessarily support it, I intuited that Sofya was, to some extent, a victim of a world that was insensitive to her valid claims to her husband’s life and to their history together. She acted out because she felt ignored. I was relieved when a number of Tolstoy’s direct descendants, told me that the film tells the story of Lev and Sofya closer to the way the family tells it than most biographies have done.