It’s hard to write an article about a slice-of-life film.
The story of the film is arguably flashier than the story in the film: this announced Peter Dinklage as a major actor. He’d had supporting roles before this, including in well-regarded movies like Living in Oblivion, but he hadn’t broken out. Hollywood didn’t–and generally still doesn’t–know what to do with an actor with dwarfism, especially one who didn’t want to only fill a narrow fantasy film niche. But The Station Agent, critically acclaimed and more than successful for its modest budget, wasn’t Hollywood. It’s very much in a particular indie mold–a tender, bittersweet, small-scale study of offbeat humanity–but while you can say what you like about this kind of Sundance special and what it omits, it casts a wider net when it comes to who gets their stories told. This is a fantasy of connection, not a fantasy of power. Actors like Dinklage should get to handle both–and eventually Dinklage, at least, would–but even one is a start.
So he stars as the train-obsessed Fin, whose quiet life–model train store job, train club social life, closed-off response to gawking and ridicule–is disrupted by the death of his boss and only friend. When he finds out his friend has left him an isolated train depot, it feels like a great way to shut his life down even more. Of course, it doesn’t work, and moving out to the station only gets him tangled up in other people’s problems and joys. Bobby Canavale plays puppyish food truck operator Joe, who sets up shop outside Fin’s depot each morning and earnestly wants to connect; Patricia Clarkson plays Olivia, a local artist whose scattered affect barely covers a profound grief.
Fin’s walls start to crumble, and as he pays a price for that, he makes sporadic attempts to rebuild them. But this is the kind of movie where it will all sort of work out and where making yourself vulnerable is worth it even if it also hurts.
See? In summary, everything sounds trite, especially ordinary life. What makes The Station Agent work isn’t its story–although this is the kind of story I always appreciate–but its lived-in performances (not only did this get the world to notice Dinklage, who’s weary and funny and vivid here, it’s also a fine showcase for Clarkson’s depth and Canavale’s affable charm, and Michelle Williams and Raven Goodwin1 also do good work in smaller parts) and its sense of observation. That observation includes quirky details, and while it’s hard to say “quirky” when reviewing an indie dramedy without sounding as if I wish to cast it into the bowels of hell, this is the good kind of character-specific quirky where it feels like everyone involved is finding what feels right for these particular characters. (Train-chasing, in one memorably funny and joyous instance.) But it also includes knowing that Joe can’t, despite his best intentions, sit and read alongside Fin in silence and that Fin would time how long it took him to crack. It’s a movie that feels like it was made by someone who’s paid attention to people and mostly likes them. That’s a good way to draw anyone in.
The Station Agent is streaming on Kanopy and Amazon Prime.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Streaming Shuffle
"There go those two unaccountable freaks."
Anthologized
Just imagine "Funeral March of a Marionette" playing for this wrap-up post of a somewhat uneven season.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season Five, Episode Nine, “Wrong Roads”
“Can I say something?” / “Not gonna be much of a conversation if you don’t.”
“Wherever you go, it’s the same dumbass cops asking the same dumbass questions.”
We’ve reached the point in the season where my observations are starting to drop off, so I’m gonna shift to more general thoughts on the show. This one in particular made me think that criminals are always gonna be inferior to cops – not morally, not intellectually, but in the sense that cops are the occupying force and, in a lot of ways, criminals are the reaction to them.
This also has Dewey finally having enough. This kind of thing is often played as a big epic moment – Breaking Bad is essentially that moment stretched out over four and a half seasons – but I like how it’s played here as a fairly impulsive, pointless bit of violence.
Eric Roberts!
“You got a kid? Jesus, what did you go and do that for?”
Biggest Laugh: “Jesus Christ? Is this real, or has early-onset dementia set in and I’m startin’ to see you in my wakin’ hours?” […] “I’ve ripped you so many assholes you don’t even know which one’s the original anymore.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “God damn, what the hell kind of place is this?!”
Top Ownage: Hammer and anvil on the guy who tried to blackmail Batman. And actually another guy gets the pencil trick pulled on him, so this must have been written by a cinephile who was watching it that week.
Eric Roberts! My mother-in-law sat next to him on a plane once, and they struck up a lovely conversation.
Justified occasionally feels like a lost action film from another age, and he especially gives this episode that feeling.
Columbo, “Murder by the Book”
Past the pilots, we have the first official episode, directed by Stephen Spielberg!
Jack Cassidy plays Ken Franklin, who’s been riding his partner’s coattails throughout their “collaborative” career writing a successful mystery series; Jim (Martin Milner), the partner, now wants to go solo, so Ken kills him to collect on the insurance he has on their shared business. It’s a clever plot, if a little too showy–you can see Franklin’s used to thinking about what will sell–but it all gets complicated when lovelorn shop-owner Lilly La Sanka (Barbara Colby) turns out to have seen more than Franklin meant her to, necessitating a second scheme.
There are some excellent directorial touches here: Rosemary Forsyth’s performance as the victim’s wife feels very Spielbergian (it’s a bit softer and more natural than most of the acting we’ve seen so far), and the way the camera cuts around when she’s awash in a sea of investigators pawing through her husband’s office, with questions flying past her, really evokes how distraught and overwhelmed she is.
It all comes together nicely on a storytelling level–I like Columbo finding the champagne cork and how Franklin covers for the call that came from his cabin (on the other hand, I’m not at all sure why it wouldn’t be easy to prove that no calls were made from the office at the time of the murder, etc., but I’m willing to believe this is down to me not knowing how 1970s phone records worked; maybe they only had date stamps, not time stamps)–but the best moments are all human. We get much more time with Columbo and a non-suspect, as he tries to comfort the grieving wife and make her an omelet, and it’s good to see more of how he acts when he’s investigating but not performing as much. I like the bittersweet sting of pathos to the reveal of Franklin’s “only good idea.” But my favorite part is La Sanka, who at first feels like she’s all teeth and aching, clueless neediness but who turns out to be shrewder and wilier than Franklin initially thinks–blackmailing a murderer is always a bad idea, but at least she knows enough not to willingly go on a boat with him afterwards, no matter what kind of crush she’s nursing–and whom Colby invests with a lot of dignity. The way she plays La Sanka’s reaction to Franklin’s dismissal of the amount of money she asked for (insignificant, he’s lost that much in one night’s gambling) is exquisite: you can feel his derision land like a sucker punch and then watch as she draws herself up to claim the value of her own perspective.
Those first few minutes are probably as good as TV directing ever got on a cop show or murder mystery back then. I wonder just how many people who were watching took notice of the quality of the work, or the name of the director.
And the screenplay is by Stephen Bochco, probably the most prominent writing talent to emerge from Columbo.
I love Columbo making the omelette (in part because that is my specialty too). He is instantly and forever shown to be a, er, good egg. Or what we might call in Yiddish a mensch.
Spielberg’s directorial credit used to be omitted from the credits when Amazon Prime began showing it. I think it was run at the end or during the “NBC Mystery Movie” pre-episode montage that ran before the episode during its original run and did not move over to streaming.
I only vaguely remember the montage from my youth (and countless MST3K gags). But thankfully the director credits showed up when I was watching the show on Peacock back when it had free content.
Elementary, “Risk Management” – Moriarty (or at least someone claiming to be Moriarty) makes an offer to Holmes: crack an unsolved murder and more clues are forthcoming. The mystery is pretty interesting, but really this is about how Holmes is manipulated despite himself to do the Napoleon of Crime’s bidding. Even as Gregson tries to warn Watson it’s going to get too dangerous around Holmes, even as Watson knows she needs to be on her toes. And it ends with a marvelously directed scene of Watson and Holmes entering a room in a mansion and slowly discovering that Irene Adler is alive! (The director is someone named Adam Davidson, an otherwise pretty run of the mill TV director who had at least one great moment.) Irene is played by Natalie Dormer, a pretty big get. To be continued into the two part finale. Really good stuff overall. And the script quotes almost verbatim the famous first lines of “A Scandal in Bohemia” (“She is THE woman…”) and also paraphrases the description of Moriarty from “The Final Problem” as the spider in the center of a web controlling everything.
Frasier, “Fathers and Sons” – Hester Crane’s long ago lab assistant comes to town, and the similarities between him and the brothers are so great that Martin wonders if Hester (who did have an affair once) slept with the assistant as well. It’s played for laughs but also with some surprising poignancy. In part because the assistant is gay, and part of his life long love for Hester comes from being able to tell her the truth back in the day. David Ogden Stiers, who could be said to have played a prot0-Frasier on MASH (and who didn’t come out till after this aired) is great as the old friend. And there is a hysterical scene were a confused Eddie keeps looking back and forth between Stiers and Grammer. Also, there’s a silly but fun B plot where Niles and Daphne struggle to come up with a good placeholder name for a VERY early preschool application. Bob Crane is right out.
Dormer is great on Elementary. I’ve seen her in a lot over the years, before and after this, but this is what I first picture when I think of her.
For me its either Game of Thrones or The Tudors as Anne Boleyn; she has this great aura of serene confidence.
Tales from the Crypt, one great probably-classic episode and one dud. The former is directed by Robert Zemeckis(!) and features a mother who’s killed her shitty husband on Christmas just as an escaped maniac in a Santa suit is on the loose. This has a palpable, pulpy, nasty joy to it that’s curiously absent from a lot of Zemeckis’ movies maybe because he actually hasn’t made much horror. Mary Ellen Trainor is terrific too making her character semi-sympathetic and increasingly desperate. The next one, with Lea Thompson as a sex worker who trades in her “beauty” for 10 grand and a better life, is pretty awful. Not only is Thompson’s “Fifties Brooklyn teenager” accent cringeworthy but the plot beats don’t make sense and it feels misogynistic, punishing her for a materialism and value set that make perfect sense given her circumstances. This is in miniature what the 2010’s Internet Left were reacting to when they wanted more stories from marginalized people about marginalized characters, or hell, ones by women about women.
Bodkin, up through episode 6.
What if you mixed Only Murders in the Building and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? And set it in Ireland? You’d get this show. Will Forte plays a podcaster who shows up to investigate a disappearance twenty years prior at a Samhain (pronounced almost like Sow-in), aided (or baby sat) by a hard boiled investigative journalist played by Siobhan Cullen and a bubbly intern played by Robyn Cara. It’s an okay show. It does suffer somewhat from the tonal mishmash. Forte is solid. Cullen puts a lot of layers into her reporter, despite starting out as almost a caricature.
The real show stealer is David Wilmer as Seamus, a local fisherman or jack of all trades with a mysterious past. He’s got the perfect mix of whimsy and danger for what the show is trying to be. He’s got the eccentric small town neighbor guy vibe going for him. He’s got the he might kill you vibe. He’s got just enough melancholy.
All in all, reasonably solid show. Not amazing but solid.
I watched this recently and I think I love it. Out and out love it. Just such a graceful, beautiful, human movie. And I haven’t seen as much of Dinklage as many – GoT is really really not for me – so any time I get to see him, it’s a treat.
Yes, it’s such a lovely, human movie! I can’t believe I went so long without seeing it. I’ve had good luck lately finding a run of films that feel life-affirming in a warm but not sappy way, and it’s been very nice.
Yeah, this is one I also love and it nails a lot of what would be indie film tropes with simple observation and recognition. Cannavale’s reaction to Dinklage timing him for instance is priceless.