Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Station Agent

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tom McCarthy (2003)

    Finbar (Fin) McBride, a solitary, thirtyish man with a passion for railways, works in a shop in Hoboken that sells and repairs model trains.  The shop owner dies suddenly.  Fin loses his job but inherits from the older man a piece of land in the back of beyond:  the plot includes a disused train depot and it’s here that Fin makes his home.  The place that he moves to is called Newfoundland – symbolically apt but a real place in New Jersey.  Shortly after arriving there, Fin twice nearly gets knocked down by an out-of-control car, driven by a neighbour, Olivia Harris.  An artist in her early forties, Olivia is trying to come to terms with the death of her young son two years previously and the end of her marriage which followed it, although this isn’t the cause of her dangerous driving.  Just outside the train depot, a Cuban-American called Joe Aramos runs a roadside drinks-and-snacks truck, owned by his father, who is recovering from illness.  Olivia is a regular customer of Joe’s, buying the truck’s supposed speciality café con leche, although he’d like their relationship to be more.  Fin is anxious to keep himself to himself but both Olivia and Joe take a determined interest in him and a tentative friendship develops among the three of them.  Other people of note in this sparsely populated film are Cleo, an African-American fourth or fifth grader who shares Fin’s enthusiasm for railways, and Emily, a young woman who works in the local library.  Each of these five characters seems alone – even Emily, who is carrying the baby of her slobby boyfriend.

    Although this is an original screenplay (by the director), the collection of solitaries has the whiff of a stage play in which the dramatis personae, each with her or his particular cross to bear, are stuck in the same place – a single set – together.  Tom McCarthy makes good use of the railroad tracks, along which Fin walks regularly and trains pass less often, but this is a movie that doesn’t move much.  On the rare occasions that something visually dynamic occurs, it seems a bit desperate – especially the repeat of Olivia’s comically losing control of the car and falling over when she first visits Fin at the depot.  The Station Agent has some well-written dialogue and the actors are strong but it would be a wan, unremarkable story if it weren’t for the fact that Fin McBride is a dwarf, that he seeks isolation because people stare or laugh at his appearance, and that he is played by Peter Dinklage, who is himself achondroplastic.

    You’re conscious of watching Dinklage’s performance differently from anyone else’s.  You assume that he must be reflecting his own experience of being gawped or sniggered at; whereas it doesn’t occur to you that Patricia Clarkson (Olivia) or Bobby Cannavale (Joe) or even the ten-year-old Raven Goodwin, as the ungainly, overweight Cleo, may be drawing on autobiographical misery to bring their character to life.   Fortunately, Peter Dinklage is subtle and incisive enough to leave you in no doubt that he is, as well as being an unusually short actor, an unusually good one.  In comparison with Fin/Dinklage’s unhappiness, Olivia’s tragedy feels conventional.  I find Patricia Clarkson more engaging when she’s being drily humorous than when she’s emoting:  she has opportunities for both here but more of the latter.  Olivia sinks into depression after the brief, unexpected reappearance of the husband from whom she’s separated.  When she learns that the woman he’s now with is pregnant, Olivia tries to commit suicide – on the same night that Fin, who’s also by now very depressed, gets drunk, keels over on the railroad tracks just as a rare train is approaching and, when he realises what’s happening, appears to welcome death.  He wakes up next morning to find he’s survived and goes straight from the tracks to Olivia’s house, where he finds her in time for her life to be saved too.

    In the penultimate scene of The Station Agent, Fin goes to Cleo’s school to talk to her class about trains, as the girl has urged him to do.  It’s a poor sequence:  one of the kids quickly interrupts Fin to ask how tall he is; the class teacher apologises and takes the boy out.  This doesn’t work at a realistic level:  it’s not clear whether the teacher did or didn’t tell the class beforehand not to make comments about Fin’s appearance – it’s hard to believe it if she didn’t and, if she did, she needs to react to the boy’s ignoring her instructions as the determined disobedience it is.  You don’t get any sense either of how Fin or Cleo feels after the talk – it’s there simply to show Fin plucking up the courage to appear in public in this way.  In the final scene, Fin, Olivia and Joe are spending the evening together, chatting easily.  This conversation is much more effective – thanks to good lines, the actors’ delivery of them and the fact that the film ends unexpectedly at this point.  Likeable as the scene is, though, the suggestion that social companionship is helping Fin and particularly Olivia to move on is too facile.

    This was the second time I’d seen The Station Agent (the first time must have been not that long after its original release).  I’m not sure why I decided to record it from television but one of the pleasures of this repeat viewing was seeing actors who I’d forgotten were in the film and whose later work I’ve enjoyed.  Michelle Williams is wonderfully vivid and natural as Emily; John Slattery registers in a cameo as Olivia’s ex-husband; as Joe, Bobby Cannavale has a great blend of warmth, empathetic humour and sensitivity.  Joe’s loneliness is more interesting than Olivia’s because it’s less obviously explicable.  Cannavale makes something touching out of Joe’s concerns about the ill health of his father (who’s never seen) and the neediness that underlies Joe’s tenacious sociability.

    17-18 November 2014

  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Ritt (1965)

    I read John le Carré’s book, published in 1963, during my term abroad in France in 1978.  The blurb on the back included Graham Greene’s judgment, ‘The best spy story I have ever read’, for which I’ve always been grateful.  I decided that, if this was the best, life was too short to read any more spy stories.  (I did actually make a start on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a year or so later, but soon found it unreadable.)   Near the end of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the eponymous agent, Alec Leamas, makes a key speech to Nan Perry[1], the girl who loves him (and whom, I suppose, Leamas loves back – as much as he can).  Nan is (or starts off as) an ardent Communist.  Inveighing against the morally bankrupt world of Cold War espionage, Leamas is scathing about his line of work – ‘What do you think spies are:  priests, saints and martyrs?’[2] he asks derisively, before telling Nan what grubby small fry he and all his kind really are.  This self-deprecating quality isn’t shared, however, by Leamas’s creator.  Le Carré’s work is tedious because of his god-awful moral solemnity and because what he has to say is windy and obvious – the stuff about the traumatising effects of loss of (the British) empire in Tinker Tailor, for example.   Still, the BBC’s highly successful dramatisation of that book in 1979 was highly enjoyable too – so it wasn’t the case that I’d deliberately avoided the screen version of The Spy in the thirty years since I read it.   Sally doesn’t believe me but I was prepared to think well of it.

    The well-known opening sequence takes place at the Berlin Wall and Martin Ritt quickly establishes the film’s moral universe (which ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ pretty well epitomises anyway).  There’s Sol Kaplan’s spare, melancholic, slightly self-important music.  There are Oswald Morris’s beautifully lit black-and-white images, which do so much throughout to contribute to the bleakness.  And, once he turns towards the camera (we see the back of his head while he speaks his first few lines), there’s Richard Burton’s ravaged and unsmiling – and, as Sally noticed, mysteriously unblinking – face.  Once the scene is set, however, it’s set in stone:  the film is monochrome in more ways than one.   Leamas is utterly disillusioned from the word go.  The only way he can develop as a character in the course of the picture is to be un-disillusioned (clearly a non-starter) or to die.  How much you get out of The Spy depends on your appetite for and ability to understand the machinery of the plot, and I’m close to being a lost cause on both counts.  I could never get to grips with what was going on nor, quite soon, did I want to.  (I remembered nothing from the book except, as soon as she appeared in the film, that the girlfriend was shot dead at the end.  I’d forgotten even that Leamas was too – perhaps because his existence already seems so much a living death.)

    It hadn’t occurred to me before that the deglamorised secret agent is a close relation of the private eye.  Raymond Chandler’s famous dictum ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean’ could apply to Alec Leamas, and not just because of his mac.  Leamas may have a drink problem and be prone to violent outbursts but the implication is that these express a self-loathing caused by the job he does – and by a capacity, which indicates his moral superiority to others in the same business, to rail against the spying game as symptomatic of a bloody awful world.  And the Cold War specifics of The Spy make this now seem a vanished world too – as much a part of the past (and as mythic) as the private detective classics of the 1940s.

    Did people in the mid-1960s take this film as seriously as its tone – bitterly reverent – suggests it should be taken?  I’d guess yes and no.  The political context of the story was, of course, taken extremely seriously:  the threat of nuclear war was oppressively real and the defection of spies one of the emblems of East-West tensions.  But a spy film didn’t need itself to reflect that angst in order to capitalise on it.  The James Bond series is the most obvious evidence of that but it was interesting to see The Spy only a few weeks after North by Northwest, which was made six years earlier.  The Cold War is part of the texture of Hitchcock’s film yet he and Ernest Lehman turn the espionage story into a jeu d’esprit.   The similarities and differences between the two films are equally striking.  Their who’s-fooling-who complications turn the plot of both into something virtually abstract:  in North by Northwest this appears deliberate and is amusing; in The Spy it seems unintended and rather ridiculous.  Although what befalls Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest isn’t remotely credible and you know he’ll come out on top eventually, you keep rooting for him – it matters emotionally whether he survives the crop-dusting plane, that he (with Eva Marie Saint) doesn’t fall from Mount Rushmore.  Richard Burton’s Leamas is meant to be grittily believable and engaged in matters of life and death that are only too real – yet you couldn’t care less about him (or Claire Bloom as Nan).

    That said, Burton is very well cast as the protagonist of a story involving a rich impasto of duplicity and so much talk.  (The talk includes loads of information, as well as the occasional spasms of purple prose invective:  the screenplay is by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper but I’m more than willing to believe they’re reproducing le Carré.)  Burton’s vocal skills allow him to make everything sound apparently meaningful; his deeply jaded spirit makes you doubt whether he means a word that he says.  The film would be pretty negligible without his presence and without Oskar Werner, wearing a very weird shiny cap and entertainingly theatrical as someone in the East German secret service (I think).  The exchanges between these two have a bit of zing, although you feel it’s the actors, rather than the men they’re playing, who are sparring.  The most inadvertently funny sequence, even though it goes on for ages, features an East German tribunal, chaired by Beatrix Lehmann (flanked by Steve Plytas and David Bauer).  My favourite bit in the whole picture was when Lehmann asked the defence lawyer (George Voskovec) if he wanted to put any questions to Leamas and he smilingly replied, ‘In a moment – but first …’.  You know how long a moment this is going to be.  The acting all round in this scene is comically hammy.

    Others involved in the continental action, and joining in with the overplaying, include Sam Wanamaker and Peter van Eyck (the intelligence officer whose allegiance is being investigated by the tribunal).  Back home in London, there’s Cyril Cusack (good as usual, as ‘Control’), Bernard Lee (M in the Bond films of the period and therefore amusingly cast as a shopkeeper here), Michael Hordern and Robert Hardy.  George Smiley is played by Rupert Davies, whom British TV audiences of the time knew as Inspector Maigret.  Leamas first gets to know Nan at the library of the Society for Psychical Research where she works (as does Leamas briefly).  This is run by a dragonish spinster (Anne Blake).  There are some obvious scornful jokes about her and the stock on the library shelves but settings like this and the grocer’s shop have a relatively unstressed sense of time and place.  They’ve stayed in my mind more clearly than the picture’s more dramatically charged locations.

    13 August 2009

    [1] According to Wikipedia, the girl’s name in the book, Liz Gold, was changed ‘because the producers were worried about out-of-context quotes of [Richard] Burton from the film being used in reference to his real-life wife’.

    [2] This is the line in the book; it may have been slightly different in the film but the message is the same.

Posts navigation