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A Miramax release. Written and directed by Tom McCarthy; starring Peter Dinklage and Patricia Clarkson.  Over the course of the last ten years, the Sundance Film Festival has garnered a reputation for producing a certain kind of extremely well-acted, off-beat, character-driven independent fare. Sex lies and videotape, In the Bedroom, Secretary, You Can Count on Me and anything by director Tom DiCillo generally fits this ‘Sundance’ billing. The appeal of these projects is twofold: 1) they are generally of a higher quality than the average studio film and 2) the nature of the material allows the filmmakers to go off on tangents or allow the story to have a few loose ends. Writer/director Tom McCarthy’s debut film, The Station Agent, is so Sundance, it is almost a parody of the genre. Anything but a pejorative statement, The Station Agent achieves this designation by seeming perfectly content at all times to meander along at its own gait. It doesn’t have a discernible beginning, middle or end. You get the feeling that there were a lot of interesting things that happened to the three main characters prior to the opening credits and sense that even more intrigue lies after the closing credits. This is quite an unusual phenomenon. And in that sense, it is strikingly original and refreshing to see on-screen. What is on-screen in The Station Agent is Fin's (Peter Dinklage) tale. Fin is a dwarf who owns two different shirts and has an unknown source of money that allows him to spend his days watching trains (which are two of those things that are probably explained prior to this tale), but neither of these facts is really that important in the grand scheme of this film. When Fin’s best and only friend dies and bequeaths him a small train station in the middle-of-nowhere New Jersey, Fin heads out to the station, where he plans to make a home for himself. Living in the station, Fin has several chance encounters with Joe (Bobby Cannole), the overly-friendly owner of the Food-on-Wheels snack truck parked outside of the station, and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a woman who is still coming to grips with both her divorce and her young son’s death. Together the three form a most unlikely trio. The relationships at the core of The Station Agent are human and loving. Fin, Joe and Olivia are real people and have a genuinely strong bond. For once, these are three people whose story actually deserves to be told. Quiet and unassuming to a fault, The Station Agent is an incredibly daring picture that is more intent on capturing the smallest gestures and glances of its three main characters than on the words they speak.  Unfortunately though, in McCarthy’s drive to capture this silence on camera, many questions go unanswered throughout the course of the movie. Fin has an incredibly strong affinity for trains and railroads, spending his days watching trains and wandering across the rails of nearby lines (when the film opens, Fin is also working in a toy train store), yet, we never learn why. The same holds true of many traits in both Joe and Olivia's lives too. And while this can be annoying at times, squinting at the screen and asking yourself, "Why in the hell is he doing that?" it is also quite easy to overlook for the most part thanks to McCarthy's ever-so-interesting on-screen interactions between the three. Soft, introspective and strangely harmonious, The Station Agent is the polar opposite of Bad Boys II. And that is anything but an insult. | |||||
