Agent Provocateur

The global community of dwarves might have legitimate reason to feel that cinema has never represented them in the most flattering light, with Snow White’s bearded chums, the munchkins from Wizard Of Oz and Darby O’Gill’s little people the only vertically-challenged specimens worthy of recall in a century of celluloid. Happily, Tom McCarthy’s sweet and quietly moving The Station Agent might well go some way towards redressing the balance.

A sparse, low-octane, largely silent work with an almost monastic air of serenity and contemplation, Station Agent recalls the work of John Cassavetes and more recent indie auteurs like Steve Buscemi and Jim Jarmusch, though it also owes a spiritual debt to the classic John Ford westerns of the golden age. It should also, if justice exists in the world, provide a career launching-pad for its diminutive four-foot-something leading man Peter Dinklage, who plays the titular hero to excellent effect, essaying a monosyllabic, taciturn dwarf who arrives unheralded in a deeply sleepy New Jersey backwater, and unenthusiastically becomes something of a focal point for the surrounding community.
As directorial debuts go, The Station Agent is an extremely auspicious early warning from its youthful creator Tom McCarthy, who accepts and cheerfully welcomes the John Ford comparisons.
“They (those Westerns) were definitely a huge influence. I don’t think there was any one overriding influence; probably every good film I’ve seen and liked since I was a kid, to be honest.”
All McCarthy’s previous experience had been in front of the camera rather than behind it, as a working actor on such movies as The Guru and Meet The Parents. His first stab at direction, The Station Agent has succeeded far beyond his initial vision.
“I knew we’d made a good film, but I’ve just been there with my mouth hanging open at how well it’s done,” he says. “I certainly hadn’t imagined the film travelling all over the world. The ambition was simply to get my first screenplay completed, and once I’d done that, the goal was to try and direct it. And even then, it was less about ambition than academic curiosity – I thought it’d be great to have that experience to help my approach to film acting. And I wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere, I just wanted to go along with the journey. Directing a film is an overwhelming task, and there were areas I felt very comfortable with, and other areas I had to learn more or less on the spot.”
The leading man, Peter Dinklage, is also a friend of McCarthy’s who added his own ideas and input to the movie.
“Most of my friends are actors, good ones and bad ones, and I would never have put this guy in my film if he wasn’t a great actor. In fact, the character of Fin didn’t start out as a dwarf. And the fact he’s a dwarf doesn’t, or shouldn’t define his character, or stereotype him any more than ‘the black kid from the ghetto’ or ‘the hooker with the heart of gold’ or any of these cliches. The funny thing is that Pete is nothing like Fin, he’s really outgoing and charming with a wicked sense of humour, where the Fin character isn’t armed with any sarcasm or irony, so we actually had to restrain Pete’s sense of humour sometimes.
As uneventful as it’s likeable, The Station Agent’s skeletal plot witnesses Dinklage’s loner inheriting a ramshackle, deserted train depot in a remote rural outpost of New Jersey.
“The depot we used in the film was my initial inspiration’, explains McCarthy, ‘it’s an amazing, beautiful location, and it’s not far at all from where I grew up. I was out there visiting my brother, who’d just bought a house, and I met the guy who owned it, who’s a rail fan, and took me to one of these meetings full of rail obsessives, which is a whole other world of its own.”
The film was made at breakneck speed in the space of twenty days, for a budget costing half a million dollars.
“It couldn’t have been any more rushed: one take and a safety if we had time was all we ever had,” he admits. “It was hard enough raising the half-million in the first place: we spent about a year and a half searching out money, and eventually – after everyone we met had said no – we met a new company called SenArt films, who had the money and loved the script and were ready to go. But you need actors who can work under those difficult conditions, who can work very quickly and confidently. I find it hard to watch the film ’cause all I can see are the mistakes, my inexperience. But I’m mostly thrilled with the way it turned out, and it’s something I’m very proud of on many levels.”