Film Club Featurette: The Station Agent (2003)

On Sunday at 2:30PM the Phnom Penh film club launches its matinee program with the gloriously understated and instantly memorable indie-underground darling from 2003, *The Station Agent*, directed by first-timer Thomas McCarthy and starring Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, and Bobby Cannavale. A rare Sundance triple prize-winner, this short and breezy picture tells a simple and unfailingly heartwarming tale about finding one's footing in social circumstances outside of one's control. 

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Fin McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a self-alienated trainspotter born with dwarfism who, upon the death of his only friend and benefactor at a railway hobby store in Hoboken, finds himself totally alone -- and also the sole inheritor of a railway station in rural New Jersey. Fin moves to the station, whereupon he is befriended against his will by a wide assortment of appropriately flawed and eclectic characters, including accident-prone Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), loquacious lunch-truck drivin' Joe (Bobby Cannavale), and the consciously innocent schoolgirl Cleo (Raven Goodwin). 

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For the first three reels the film is content to dish-up a steady diet of inoffensive humor at the expense of the lead character, whose desire "just to be left alone" keeps somehow getting harder and harder for him to realize. When the movie takes its obligatory turn in the direction of just how it would feel for Fin to get his wish, our hearts melt in spite of our best efforts to dismiss the whole thing as too predictable. 

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McCarthy’s bit-part acting career and abortive stabs at screenwriting could hardly have done a less effective job of telegraphing the adroit directorial hand that he brought to this widely lauded directorial debut. Having met his cast in assorted Broadway theater projects, McCarthy wrote each part for the specific actor or actress he subsequently cast—and it shows. Where austere filming budgets and crazy-short shooting schedules would have left a lesser talent sitting in the corner with twigs in his hair, McCarthy pivots to those limitations as his creative impetus to tell a story much more subtle and nuanced than a less hampered production would have crafted through bigger moments splashed across the screen.  

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Over and above the aforementioned triple-prize at Sundance, The Station Agent was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards, two Writers’ Guild prizes, and won the 2003 BAFTA for best original screenplay. Writing for NPR’s Morning Edition, Ken Turan observed, “The film’s strength is that it makes its optimistic point about community without falling back on cheap plot devices that force us to see the matter any certain way. Instead a trio of unlikely characters much more gracefully show us how we are drawn to each other (almost in spite of ourselves) through each of our own messy and unresolved narratives.”

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Tom McArdle’s maestro editing and a letter-perfect score by soundtrack newcomer Stephen Trask only serve to fortify the relaxed, quiet-til-it-isn’t triptick of flawed and limping human specimens, doing what they can for each other and, along the way, themselves. The cherry on top is McCarthy's down-to-the-microsecond awareness of precisely the right moment to end his movie and roll the credits. (You'll have to watch it to see what I mean.)

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I hope everyone can join us for our inaugural matinee on Sunday at 2:30pm for this improbably effervescent little bonbon of hope and realism and a shared future that, if not exactly chosen, might just manage to fortify our heroes for the siege that we call life.