Here's another of the viewing notes from one of the south London FEAST Film Nights screenings (from 2015, hence slight out of datedness).
Finbar McBride is a lonely soul, a dwarf, gently obsessed by trains, who with his friend Henry runs a model shop in Hoboken, New Jersey. When Henry unexpectedly dies, Finbar learns that he has been bequeathed a small abandoned train station building deep in the country. With nothing left for him in Hoboken, the grieving Finbar ups sticks and moves into the rundown and rather pokey railway hut, building a fragile friendship with a variety of characters: happy go lucky Joe who runs an ice cream van, standing in for his ill father; painter Olivia, who has a sorrow of her own; a young girl called Cleo; and Emily the librarian.
The Station Agent was the first film from director and
writer Tom McCarthy (who also produces and acts, the show-off). McCarthy is now
more famously known for his latest movie, the riveting and powerful Spotlight
(2015), which among other accolades won him ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original
Screenplay’ Oscars at the last Academy Awards. It’s tempting to make
comparisons between both films – small people against the big bad world, if
that doesn’t sound too trite – but in reality The Station Agent is very much a
first film, unsure and hesitant, full of uncertain characters mired in their
own worlds. This, by the way, is a good thing.
Peter Dinklage, with his sonorous voice and expressive eyes,
is now a household name courtesy of the massively popular Game of Thrones TV
series. But when The Station Agent was released the film gave the largely
unknown actor his first major role. He is absolutely exceptional in this movie.
Director of Photography Oliver Bokelberg’s camera spends a lot of time looking
at him, as do we the audience. We’re invited to stare at and then move on from
Dinklage’s dwarfism. This is because unlike many of the cast’s reactions to his
size – shock, screaming, ignoring, staring and in one case taking a photograph
– we also spend a lot of time in his company, and understand him first as a
human being and second (or maybe third) as a person of small stature. What we
never understand is his back story, which contrasts with the lives of Joe and
Olivia, who feel comfortable confiding their troubles to Finbar. McBride in
truth never invites these confessions – he just wants to live his life and
indulge his obsession with trains, ambling among the discarded rolling stock of
the New Jersey countryside – and the human cost of any personal interaction is
clearly and brilliantly etched on his face.
In a 2003 interview McCarthy drew comparisons between
casting a dwarf in a lead role with that of doing the same with a black actor
thirty years previously. “Putting the financing together for The Station Agent you had people saying, 'Think about this, people aren't ready to watch a dwarf
in the lead role of a movie'. I'd be like 'How do you know that?' A lot of the
time I'd be talking to people about the film and, almost as an aside they'd say
to me 'I have to say, he's very sexy'. You know, if it was George Clooney, they
wouldn't be whispering that to me, they'd just come out and say it. It is
almost taboo.”
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