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
