The Station Agent

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * *)

As small of stature and big of heart as its main character, this film - which won the audience award at Sundance last year - is the directing debut of an actor whose Hollywood bit-parts have included Meet the Parents and television's Boston Public.

And it's a gem, an offbeat and utterly charming story of the redemptive power of friendship which recalls Percy Adlon's 80s charmer Bagdad Cafe in the way it takes the oddest of trios and welds them into an unforgettable ensemble.

Fin (Dinklage) is a dwarf who inherits an abandoned railway station in the backblocks of New Jersey when his only friend, the owner of the model-train shop where Fin works, drops dead. Fin's a train nut and the railway loves him too, a point McCarthy underlines by showing us how railway sleepers are a dwarf's pace apart. But his passion is not geeky obsession and he stands apart from the more extreme trainspotter.

In fact, he stands apart from everyone. We can read in Fin's gait, in the determined set of his jaw and his downcast eyes that his is a soul hammered by a lifetime of derision. He's not so much lonely as just alone.

His isolation faces a stern challenge from Joe (Cannavale), a mercilessly cheerful Cuban who sells coffee from the back of a truck practically at Fin's front door and later from Olivia Harris (Clarkson), a dreamy, middle-aged artist who is coping with the double grief of bereavement and marital split and is trying to separate one from the other.

Not much happens between these three once the film has contrived to bring them together but we can't take our eyes off them. The three loners' lives intersect but since each is carrying a burden of spoken or unspoken grief the process is never easy. In the end, it's a film that explores territory where most movies never go: the lonely passions of the human heart.

It's in the unstudied performances that the film's unique charm resides: Cannavale's Joe is a sloppy mixture of generosity and neediness who is instantly likeable and Dinklage holds the screen with a burning intensity which is at once aloof and attractive.

The Station Agent has a dense, slightly novelistic flavour to it, as though it were hewn from raw material by Raymond Carver or Annie Proulx. But it's a true original, as odd a film as you're likely to see all year. It will tow your heart away.

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale, Raven Goodwin, Paul Benjamin, Michelle Williams

Director: Tom McCarthy

Running time: 88 mins

Rating: M (drug use, offensive language)

Screening: Academy