The Station Agent (2003) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

"Yes they're sharing a drink they call loneliness

But it's better than drinking alone."

-- Piano Man, Billy Joel --

The Station Agent was one of the most popular films at Sundance this year (2003), winning both the screenwriting award and the audience award. It may be the best reviewed film of the year, with 97% positive reviews, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It is rated 8.2 at IMDb, good enough to make the top 60 of all time if it had enough votes. Most people who have seen it have liked it, as you might well have guessed from its having received the audience award at Sundance.

So why haven't you ever heard of this film? A couple of reasons:

1. Miramax believed it was a small, personal kind of film without sufficiently broad appeal to compete toe-to-toe with the big Hollywood epics, so they gave it a cautious arthouse roll-out. Actually, "cautious" doesn't say the half of it. After four weeks, despite great reviews and good revenues per screen, it had reached only 58 screens.

2. For some reason, they marketed this as a comedy. While the author has a sense of humor, it is really just a real-life character-based drama with a few moments to make you smile, all of which come naturally out of the characters and situations.

What is it all about? Not much of anything. In a small town in rural New Jersey, three completely mismatched people come together because of their mutual loneliness. An upper-middle class female artist, a Cuban-American hot dog vendor, and a reclusive dwarf are brought together mainly through the efforts of the gregarious hot dog guy, who really wants to make friends. Many of the film's best moments are based on the fact that the three friends really don't have much to say to one another, but they hang out anyway, because "It's better than drinking alone." They push each other away, pull back together, and eventually come to a genuine warmth in their friendship.

The film has a lot of guts. Some examples:

• Rather than try to make the dwarf a sympathetic character, the author wrote him as the world's most boring human being. He gets off on reading about trains, and is obsessed with them, even timing their passage to the exact minute. As if being boring weren't a big enough character flaw, he's also taciturn and dour, and more than a little bit cynical and distrustful. He's not a bad person, but he's not a loveable one, either.

• There is very little dialogue, and very little action. A lot of the movie consists of three people sitting quietly, or walking along railroad tracks. That pacing required three terrific actors to make the whole thing work, and the director found them in Bobby Cannavale, Peter Dinklage, and Patricia Clarkson.

The film's auteur, Thomas McCarthy, is an actor by trade, or at least he used to be. The Station Agent is his first credit as either a director or a writer, but I suppose some doors are open for him now.

Nice job. If you like low key, personal, character-based independent films, check it out. It hooked me in against my will, and it may do the same to you.

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Additional notes on second viewing: it does have a lot more humor than I picked up the first time through. Not wacky stuff, but quiet, low-key, charming humor.