THE STATION AGENT (2003)

RATING: - 9/10. 

 What is it about Peter Dinklage that makes him so irresistible to watch? He’s handsome, certainly. And the fact that he’s a few inches short of four and a half feet must have something to do with it. But there’s more to his screen persona than just his height and his looks. For one thing, he has a honeyed baritone voice to kill for. But he has an aura, more than anything—an aura born of acceptance of his own un-ordinariness, perhaps. He is so used to being stared and gawked at, wherever he goes, day in and day out, that being in front of a camera and having his image projected on a giant screen to be watched by hundreds of people comes naturally to him; his life is already a peepshow for most people he meets. THE STATION AGENT is a heartbreakingly beautiful film, made all the more attractive by the presence of this unheralded star of the silver screen. 

The film is about an extremely introverted train aficionado called Finbar McBride (Fin to everyone), played with sublime grace by Dinklage, whose hermetic lifestyle constructing models of trains in a Hoboken hobby shop owned by who seems like his only friend in the world, the similarly quiet and sober Henry Styles, goes woefully awry when Henry dies, leaving Fin a little rural land in Newfoundland, New Jersey, with an abandoned train depot on it. Fin may have found his paradise. He has a problem dealing with people and for good reason; more often than not, he’s treated as a freak, a walking-talking cartoon, a grotesque caricature to be gawked at and insulted. He finds it better to just stay with his train models, walking the “right of way” (which means walking along an abandoned rail line), watching his movies of trains chugging by, smoke billowing from their tops. He has given up on the world. 

What he doesn’t count on his talkative, relentlessly upbeat neighbor Joe Oramas (a bravura turn by TV regular Bobby Cannavale) who runs his dad’s hot-dog/coffee trailer near Fin’s train depot. Although Fin is completely unresponsive to the perky but lonely Joe’s efforts at forging a friendship, gradually Fin begins to acquiesce to his advances, letting Joe come on his railroad walks, having lunches with him, telling him about trains. Their friendship is painted with wonderful acuity of observation and humor and is a sublime joy to watch. For example, during smoking a joint together, here’s a piece of their conversation.
Joe: -Trains are really cool.

Fin: -So are horses.

Joe (confused): -What?

Fin (dazed): -I was just thinking that.

Joe: -Gimme the joint, man.

Joe slowly brings Fin out of his shell, making him think that maybe a few human relationships might not be such a bad idea. Fin also meets an attractive, troubled woman Olivia Harris (played with grace and insight by Patricia Clarkson) who has moved to the quiet little town because of her son’s death. Director Tom McCarthy deserves a truckload of credit for not assuming immediately (like most filmmakers do) that since these two characters have developed a connect and are both romantically available, they MUST end up together by the end of the film. This film is much more subtle than this; we get the feeling that since Olivia’s son and Fin are about the same size, part of Fin’s appeal to Olivia is because she can almost believe it is her son she is seeing when she looks at Fin. McCarthy does not feel the need to bombard us with explanations. He is content to let us into the lives of these desperately lonely characters, all of them hurting in their own way, looking for some companionship, perhaps a “witness to their lives”.

This is a movie that seems to speak of a lived-in life, so to say. The humor in the film rings of real-world laughs. Y'know the sort of laughter that comes with a friend having trouble tearing off a tough piece of meat, or a shared inside joke about a certain character trait of someone you know well. There are no grand set-pieces here, just people going on about their ordinary lives. This is what the cinema is all about, at least to me: life through a different lens. The characters in the film do not believe their lives are special, but we, as viewers, can look at them from a distance and see the poetry and the beauty hidden behind the commonplace mundane details of their everyday existence.

In a film like this, the responsibility on the actors is enormous. There are no spectacular CGI effects to detract us from the human story. Clarkson, Dinklage and Cannavale are all wonderful in their respective roles. Clarkson brings a pathos and a deep, inconsolable sadness to her role and yet keeps Olivia from becoming emo or gratingly depressive. Cannavale is the life and soul of the film, with his irrepressible buoyancy and infectious zeal for life. We feel that both Fin and Olivia like him because they both want to be as happy as he is and hope some of his enthusiasm for life might just rub off on them (which it does, actually). But the star of the film is Peter Dinklage. This is a character as far removed from Dinklage’s star-making turn as the Machiavellian Tyrion Lannister in the HBO original series GAME OF THRONES as possible. THE STATION AGENT gave Dinklage his breakthrough and we can see why. He radiates enough screen presence to make most stars of the Golden Hollywood era cry with envy, executing every nuance, every movement with skill and a thorough understanding of his character. It was said of Heath Ledger’s performance in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN that he did not just know how Ennis talked, but even how he breathed. The same can be said of this wonderful, wonderful performance. When he gets up on a table in the bar he avoids throughout the film, and in a drunken haze of pain, frustration and betrayal, shouts, “HERE I AM! TAKE A LOOK!” we see his intense vulnerability. For the first time in his film, he opened up to someone and all he gets is pain for it. Maybe his cocoon of banishment was better.

A fantastic dramedy, one of the best Sundance features of the last 10 years, a superbly observed and executed character study, helmed by an immensely talented director and given wings to fly by his mercurial star. 9/10.

ANIMAL KINGDOM (2012)

Gangster movies have to walk a tight line. Like in all films, our protagonists must be people we can root for, people who should be able to get away with whatever they did by the end, and we, as an audience, would be okay with it. But unlike crime capers like OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the characters have to be frightening. Disney-fication of the hard edges of crime cannot be allowed and the consequences of criminality cannot be watered down or smoothed over. The solution to this quandary is usually to give us one character who will be our entry-way, either because he’s relatively non-threatening and is not a hardened criminal yet, and put him in a world which has no place for anyone who is NOT a robber, murderer, kidnapper or racketeer, and by gradually bringing us into this world, exposes the relative sanity behind the shootouts, the drugs and the self-destructiveness. It gives us family breakfasts and character singularities and bar-room confessions to humanize otherwise inscrutable psychopaths. It makes us empathize. This is what made Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola so good at this genre. They understood. They realized what made these people tick, what they were like with their wives and parents and children and friends. They knew what made them shoot a person in cold blood. And this is where so many film-makers go wrong, ruining the delicate balance of emotions that characterize any good gangster film. Why would any film-maker want to undertake such a risky genre at all? Because you get to explore the trappings of conventional legal society, the amorality of a flashy charismatic powerful set of people and because it’s so fucking delicious. And now comes another director to join the Gangster Movie Hall of Fame—David Michod. 

 

ANIMAL KINGDOM reminded me of THE DEPARTED in more ways than one—not for the plot (the two plotlines have almost nothing in common), but because of its pulsing, throbbing energy, its magnetic dizzying musical score and by its insightful analysis of guilt, loyalty and life outside the law. The film takes us into an Australian crime family, the Codys, ruled with a delicate powdered iron hand by the matriarch Janine “Smurf” Cody (played with grey-eyed venom by Aussie powerhouse 

Jackie Weaver). The family consists of Smurf and her three sons—the eldest Andrew “Pope” Cody (Ben Mendelsohn, in the form of his life) is a notorious, psychopathic armed robber on the run from the police, the middle son Craig (a rightfully twitchy and believable Sullivan Stapleton) is a volatile drug dealer constantly on edge from ingesting large quantities of his own product and the youngest Darren (THE MUMMY alumnus Luke Ford) is still in his early twenties, looking up to his brothers for inspiration but frightened by the implications of their actions. Also included unofficially is Barry “Baz” Brown (Joel Edgerton in a maverick cameo), the best friend and partner-in-crime of Pope Cody. The family is tightly controlled by the deceptively effeminate Smurf Cody, who exacts long kisses from each of her sons as a gesture of obeisance, in a subliminal attempt to assert who’s boss. The whole family is living in constant fear of the loose-cannon Armed Robbery Squad, who have developed a fetish for “encounter killings” of major players in the Melbourne bank robbery scene. Into this tinderbox of a situation is thrown in Joshua “J” Cody (an intensely vulnerable performance from newcomer James Frecheville), the son of Smurf’s estranged daughter. When J’s mother dies after OD-ing on heroin, Smurf happily takes in the 17 year-old. On the other end of the spectrum is Nathan Leckie (played with the ease of a maestro by Guy Pearce), one of the few honest police officers in the Armed Robbery Squad. Throughout the film, Leckie and Smurf are locked in an intense cat-and-mouse game.

What is most frightening about this film is how in the face of such madness, J seems to think he’s living a reasonably sane life. As he says, “All this seemed strange to me and not strange either. Kids just are wherever they are and just doing whatever they’re doing, y’know?” In a situation like this, anybody can kill. A gun thrown into the hands of a seventeen year-old from a more-or-less parentless home and in the care of a crime family—how does he know not to shoot? The movie doesn’t let us be passive spectators looking on at the proceedings from a distance. We smell the blood, the shattered glass, the broken bones, the cold metal of a loaded gun. We’re constantly thrown into the shoes of J, and there is no escape from the knotty questions the film asks. This is a movie with free will—anything can (and does) happen right around the corner.

And yet David Michod is not here to judge. His lens is an objective one. Save for the terrifying 

brutality of Pope Cody, he chooses to show things as they are and let his audience decide about the good guys and the bad. He is a talent to be reckoned with, a magnificent gift to world cinema, courtesy of the Australian film industry. With vivid visual flair, virtually inexhaustible stores of empathy and a fantastic gift for finding the perfect synthesis of music and image, Michod has all the skills to make a great director. He makes sure that his viewers are always aware of the danger his characters are in, never letting the pace slacken, bringing on scene after gripping scene. Antony Partos’ moody, ominous electronic musical score accentuates every moment of the film with its seductive dark grooves. This is one of the best background scores I’ve seen in any crime movie, contributing hugely to the effectiveness of the film.

A near-flawless thriller and a masterful study of the criminal psyche from a debut director who shows oodles of promise; THIS is what Sundance is all about. A fantastic 9/10 for me.