Movies into Film.com
The Station Agent
Directed by Tom McCarthy
USA, 2003
Late for the Train
Writer-director Tom McCarthy’s debut film The Station Agent isn’t a romance in any traditional sense. It’s more of a “three for the road” movie, although in this case the road happens to be abandoned railroad track that winds through an idyllic rural New Jersey. No one works, exactly; the main characters pursue their hobbies (painting, or obsessing over locomotive memorabilia) at leisure. McCarthy’s endeavor is so often a beautifully observed character study, I wish that the film taken as a whole were stronger. As is, radiant moments of wonder vie with clubfooted errors in judgment for a resting place in our hearts and minds.
The movie lets us be flies on the wall in the uneventful lives of Fin, a dwarf who has inherited an ancient depot; Joe, a java-slinging co-dependent who operates an espresso stand across from the depot; and Olivia, a yuppie hippie played to near perfection by the great Patricia Clarkson. All you need to know about the unaccountable bond that forges this threesome might be summed up in the following exchange.
Joe: Are you hungry?
Fin: No.
Joe: Thirsty?
Fin: No.
Joe: You don’t really say much, do you?
Or try this terse repartee.
Joe: What do you do for fun?
Olivia: I don’t.
Such closely held cards, in essence, form The Station Agent, a film that doesn’t “say much” yet speaks volumes. Joe loves life whereas Olivia and Fin can barely stand it. Earlier on, there’s a priceless bit wherein a group of lonely men watch 8-millimeter footage of a train chugging through Canadian snowdrifts, then entering (the home movie auteur assures his audience) “one of the darker tunnels in Canada.”
The one and only Ms. Patricia Clarkson (Photo: Miramax)
The Station Agent follows a familiar trajectory of resistance, bonding, falling out and a coming to senses reunion. If McCarthy had either skipped the falling out or made the separation less opaque (at least to us, if not his participants) then he might have had the season’s sharpest film. Things fall apart, in more ways than one, when Olivia ditches Joe and Fin. Accomplished as Clarkson is, not even she can flesh out the screenplay’s sketchiness in this crucial shift.
As the other two-thirds of the movie’s platonic triangle, Peter Dinklage as Fin and the handsome Bobby Cannavale as Joe are first-rate. As Joe begins to accompany Fin on the dwarf’s solitary excursions to watch passing trains go by, the ruggedly built Cannavale (the costume designer wants you to notice) suggests a less manic Nicolas Cage with a real actor housed inside. Dinklage achieves the maximum with a minimal character, although McCarthy saddles him with a hideous hallucinatory sequence in which the actor must grin insidiously while caught in the headlights of an oncoming choo-choo. If ever a scene stood up and begged to be scissored on the cutting room floor, it’s that one.
A pleasant surprise is Raven Goodwin as Cleo, a young girl prone to exploring junked train cars. I found Goodwin unbearable in last year’s ill-named Lovely & Amazing; she played Brenda Blethyn’s adopted daughter, a puffy overeater who took petulance overboard. Here, Goodwin manages to be fresh and appealing, as warm as the Jersey summer days so beguilingly rendered by the German cinematographer Oliver Bokleberg.
Two questions remain. Is The Station Agent a jumble? I’m afraid so. Is the movie worth seeking out? Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. – NPT
August 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com