DIFF ’03: The Station Agent (2003)

****/****
starring Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale, Raven Goodwin
written and directed by Thomas McCarthy

by Walter Chaw If there's a flaw to Thomas McCarthy's The Station Agent, it's that there are elements to the narrative that don't make a lot of literal sense–the question of why someone would set up a coffee cart in the middle of a remote train yard the most obvious one that springs to mind. But in a film shot through with the melancholy hue of Longfellow's "My Lost Youth," gaps in credibility should be seen as poetic device, perhaps, or metaphor. The picture is heartbreak, a diary of the million betrayals and disappointments that make up an over-examined life composed all of loneliness and solitude. At its best, The Station Agent captures the isolation of any soul too sensitive, too intelligent for the harsh inconsiderateness of a world more interested in brashness than subtlety.

Finbar (Peter Dinklage) is a "little person" who inherits a railway station in rural New Jersey from his friend and partner. Independent by nature and necessity, the insensitivities of the world at large making an emotional hermit of him (much like Finbar's namesake saint), Finbar is assaulted with good intentions by garrulous, infectiously friendly coffee-cart proprietor Joe (Bobby Cannavale) and twice driven off the road by bereaved artist Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), mourning the death of her young son. The idea that Olivia may fall in love with Finbar because he reminds her of her boy, and the idea that Joe might like Finbar just because Joe likes people, is the crux and the tension of the piece: The Station Agent is fascinating because its issues are the issues of man in society, the vagaries of interpersonal relationships in all their Byzantine complexities.

There is a montage in the middle of the film, a quick one, that cuts between Finbar in a bar waiting for a friend who isn't showing up and Finbar in his station, watching a train go by in the middle of the night, that is crystalline in its purity. It belies analysis of this film as merely character drama: McCarthy's wide-open shots remind of the austere hidden America ethos of a David Gordon Green, while his long compositions maroon Finbar–already small, he's made all the smaller before the giant engines that are his passion and the empty flatlands that reflect his Spartan interiors. The Station Agent isn't about self-pity, though one character's genetic misfortune makes him an outcast, another's effusive good humour, and the last's her perpetual grief. Rather, the film is a lovely, careful collection of fragments shored against our collective ruins.

Perfectly paced, perfectly pitched, The Station Agent is unassuming and discreetly engaging. Even the smallness of the film's focus finds a parallel in Finbar's plight with a sequence in which Finbar and Joe chase a train with a camcorder, providing both a moment of joy that is, as only happiness can be, ephemeral and rejuvenating. I have an idea about The Station Agent, and it involves the belief that a medicine for melancholy is the ability to indulge in the madness of trusting another person as flawed, as mercurial, as yourself–to accept that it'll all end in tears one way or another, but until that time, the soft insanities of love and faith are the agony and ecstasy of being human. It's a wonderful picture that hides its sprawling aspirations in a modest package. Originally published: October 3, 2003.