Deborah Lipp

The Station Agent (2003) 10/10
Fin (Peter Dinklage) is a train enthusiast and a dwarf. When his friend and employer (at a model train store) dies, he leaves Fin a piece of land in a small town that has a train depot on it. There, Fin’s solitude is disturbed by other lonely locals and he begins, initially against his will, to form relationships.

See, I’ve given it ten points, and I’ve described it, and now I just don’t know what to say. The Station Agent is such a lovely, gentle movie, that talking about it seems, to quote Patricia Clarkson’s character Olivia, “loud.”

I’ve written about The Station Agent before. Months after seeing it, it remains present for me, something that doesn’t always happen; I’m not always a good judge of how I will feel about a movie months or years in the future, but The Station Agent has established itself as a favorite. Having been away from television and theaters for a week, I thought I’d pull up an older review. While I was away, I spent time with two dear friends, sisters, who are dwarfs, so I was reminded of this movie.

Peter Dinklage is one of my favorite character actors. His expressiveness, his voice, his beautiful eyes, allow you to move past looking at his dwarfism, to looking at him. That his dwarfism is part of the story is unavoidable, but as Fin learns, dwarfism is just one of many things that can leave you lonely and a little lost. Grief is another, and Olivia is grieving. Just not fitting in is another, and Joe (Bobby Cannavale), the coffee-and-snack truck guy who parks opposite Fin’s station, is a Hispanic New Yorker with no ability to connect to his rural New Jersey customers. In Fin (who is from Hoboken), he senses an urban kindred, and pushes friendship on his reluctant neighbor.

As Fin, Joe, and Olivia form a trio full of silences and hesitations, they also begin to look out for one another in unexpected ways. As well, Fin’s train enthusiasm becomes the most interesting oddity about him, and people begin (in baby steps) to view him more as the ‘train guy’ than the ‘little guy.’

Early in the movie, we meet Fin’s “train chaser” friends, and I was struck by what big geeks they were. I was reminded of Ghost World, and its LP-collector geeks. One could go off on a tangent about geeks and geekiness. Trekkies and Trekkers take a lot of heat, but the truth is, any interest looks bizarre to the people who don’t have it, and oddity isn’t the worst thing. Maybe boredom is a much worse thing—the boredom experienced by people who don’t have intense interests. The Station Agent is very much about oddity; experienced from the inside and stared at from the outside. But mostly it’s about the necessity of friendship and connection.