'Station Agent' oddballs keep film on right track

'THE STATION AGENT' (star)(star)(star)

October 17, 2003|By Allison Benedikt, Tribune staff reporter.

In a recent New York Times interview, actor Peter Dinklage, the 4-foot-5-inch leading man of "The Station Agent," promises to always play characters meant to be dwarfs. "Obviously," Dinklage noted, "there I am--you can't deny it."

But Dinklage is not resigned to playing boilerplate dwarf roles: dwarf as human grotesquerie or comic relief. Instead, what we learn from his role in writer/director Tom McCarthy's beautifully sincere, character-driven film is that for Dinklage, being short is something he is, it's part of what makes him human, not some sort of freak genetic mutation to mine for cinematic eye candy.

In "The Station Agent," Dinklage plays Finbar McBride, a withdrawn train aficionado, measured in his every move and at ease only in the back room of the hobby shop where he works. Fin rarely speaks, holds a cigarette between yellowed fingers and carries his burden on his face--clenched jaw, chiseled chin and sad eyes. When the shop owner dies, Finbar inherits his train depot, a run-down shack in a small New Jersey town that, despite lying along the tracks, has been left off the line's route.

Fin is forced out of his insular world by the unlikely friendships thrust upon him by two town oddballs: Joe (Bobby Cannavale), a gregarious Cuban-American son of a hot dog vendor, and Joe's regular cafe con leche customer Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), an artist who grieves for her young son's death and the effect it has had on her deteriorating marriage.

Cannavale's charming, goofy performance exposes Joe's character with ease: No matter how many times he calls his buddies in Manhattan on his cell phone, probing them on who went out with whom last night, his real desire is for sincere human contact. He's an egoless blowhard, talkative to a fault and content to chat up Fin, a master of the one-word response, but only truly happy when real friendship blooms.

Of course, Joe notices Fin's height (he asks him about dwarf sex), but doesn't see Fin primarily in relation to his size (made most clear when Joe wonders if there are clubs for people like Fin--and by "people like Fin," he means train enthusiasts).

Clarkson, with her raspy voice and natural bohemian intensity, turns in an emotionally frazzled, though not fragile, performance as Olivia, a woman overwhelmed by the cruelty and guilt of losing a son.

Her friendship with Fin is as complicated as any in real life, with tinges of sexual attraction, pure tenderness, burden and repulsion. It is her inability at times to be around any other human being that connects her to Fin, but her spirit that ironically makes Fin more akin to Joe: in need of human contact.

Very little actually happens in "Station Agent."

Reluctantly, Fin allows Joe and Olivia to accompany him on his train track walks; they have a sleepover at Olivia's, Fin smiles a gorgeous smile and Joe tries to read a book, but can't stay quiet for more than a few minutes.

McCarthy stumbles only when he forces things to unfold. Wedged between the many unaffected scenes is a painfully melodramatic one in which Fin, drunk in a crowded pub, stands up on the bar and wails for his pubmates to "take a good look," letting out the aggression that we always knew was there.

Toward the end, McCarthy squeezes in these made-for-the-movies moments, and the film loses some potency as we are made hyper-aware of Fin's "condition." Fin becomes the symbol, the freak, the oddity again; whereas for most of the film, he is only as odd as Joe and Olivia--three eccentrics rendered positively normal in a friendship built on the crap we all face every day.

`The Station Agent'


Directed and written by Tom McCarthy; photographed by Oliver Bokelberg; edited by Tom McArdle; music by Stephen Trask; produced by Robert May, Mary Jane Skalski and Kathryn Tucker. A Miramax Films release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:28. MPAA rating: R (for language and some drug content).

Finbar McBride ........... Peter Dinklage

Joe Oramas ............... Bobby Cannavale

Olivia Harris ............ Patricia Clarkson

