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The Station Agent

Attaching Souls At the Train Stop

By John Anderson | STAFF WRITER

October 3, 2003

(R). Three people - one a lonesome dwarf, another a grieving mother - become friends in the wilds of New Jersey. Tender, funny, frank and true. With Peter Dinklage, Bobby Cannavale, Patricia Clarkson, Raven Goodwin, Michelle Williams. Written and directed by Tom McCarthy. 1:28 (adult content, language). At area theaters.

Like a chicken-and-egg sandwich, there's something a little disconcerting about a film such as "The Station Agent," which makes the point that a dwarf is just a man, but still gets loads of media attention because its lead actor is a dwarf. The result is a movie with an intellectual existence both on and off the screen, as well as an emotional resonance that is difficult to shake.

The dwarf in question is played by veteran actor Peter Dinklage, who gives a tremendously touching performance as Fin McBride, a railroad aficionado who works in a model train shop (the small man/small train parallel probably amounting to metaphorical overkill). When Henry (Paul Benjamin), the store's owner and Fin's only friend, dies abruptly, Fin is left without a job, but does inherit Henry's derelict train depot in Newfoundland, N.J.

One would have to guess that Dinklage, whose long list of credits includes Tom DiCillo's "Living in Oblivion," is drawing on certain personal experiences in making Fin the painfully solitary figure he is. Everyone stares - it may be with clueless wonder, it may be with derision, but they stare, nonetheless - and Fin moves through the scrutiny with practiced impassivity. Still, it's a lonely life, and Fin embraces the loneliness, moving into his train station prepared, and hoping, to be left alone.

Naturally, it doesn't work that way, or this feature would have been a short. (Sorry. No pun intended.) In his first day in Newfoundland, the auto-less, phone-less and friendless Fin is run off the road twice by one Olivia Harris, a woman Patricia Clarkson imbues with what has become her standard blend of knowing sexiness and easy eccentricity. She is in mourning for a child and divorcing a husband. Whether Fin somehow represents a synthesis of the two is a question writer- director Tom McCarthy leaves hanging out there like an intellectual piñata. Part of the charm of the movie is that the viewer has to decide whether to smack the thing or not.

The wild card and the ingredient that makes "The Station Agent" so warm and delightful is Bobby Cannavale ("Third Watch," "Sex and the City"), who lightens the film precisely each time it needs lightening and is consistently hilarious as Joe, da guy who runs da coffee wagon outside Fin's station. His insistent friendliness toward Fin, who can resist only so far and so long, is a symptom of his own loneliness, but McCarthy's well- taken point is that the most disparate people can come together, even if their only tie is a lack of ties.

"The Station Agent" is what critics often call a small movie. (Sorry. Did it again.) And what this usually refers to is budgets and subject matter. People and their need for connections are the subjects of McCarthy's very human movie. And there's nothing inadequate about either what he set out to do or how well his movie does it.