Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
When our friend El Guapo isn’t busy terrorizing small Mexican villages, he loves to peek at upcoming movies, and he’s fallen head over heels, it seems, for one of this year’s big Sundance sensations. I’ll let him explain it to you:
El Guapo here and I have to say that I am in a daze. I have just come back from a screening of THE STATION AGENT, and I loved it. Me gusta mucho. The movie had so much warmth and it was just so damn cute that I can't believe it. This is why I go to the movies, for that one special movie that just uplifts you and takes you on a journey with these amazing characters. I love to see independent films such as this because the bar has to be so much higher for it to be made. If Cuba Gooding Jr. wants to make a horrible movie about acting gay on a gay cruise, they let him, but if someone wanted to make that without that kind of backing, no way no how.
The Station Agent is about a dwarf named Fin. Let us just get that out of the way. I know that they are trying to say that it is just about this guy who likes his space, but most of the reason that he likes his space is because people look at him as a dwarf, so I will just leave it at that. He loses his friend to death at the beginning and he is bequeathed a half acre in rural New Jersey in which there is an old Train Station complete with run down train car. Fin goes to live there partly because he no longer has a job, but also because he loves trains. Trains are his life. I have heard of train spotters before, but never before have I begun to understand their fascination. By the end of the film I am quite drawn to them, I must say.
I was just about to tell you basically the whole story but the jist is that Fin, a dwarf, a loner, comes in to town wanting to be alone but as time flies he can't help but make friends. It is such a sweet story because it is so simple and so to the point. There are no big conspiracies or great love stories, it is just these people that find each other.
The movie stars Peter Dinklage, he was the guy in the acrondoplasiacy mob, or whatever it was called, in Human Nature. Accompanying him were Patricia Clarkson as a sad artist and Bobby Canavale as Joe, the guy who runs a hot dog stand outside of Fin's station house.
The acting was amazing, Dinklage had such a great, subdued performance that when he smiled in that one scene, it just made me glow. Patricia Clarkson, I love her. She is old enough to be my mother, but I couldn't get enough of her. Her face is so angelic and everything about her was so fragile and pure. Cannavale provided most of the laughs in the movie and he was perfect. He was ying to Fin's yang. They played off of each other so well.
Back to the whole language thing that I have talked about before in other reviews. In a couple of scenes he talks to his father on the phone in spanish, and I loved the fact that it wasn't subtitled. I love that we aren't meant to understand what he is saying. It doesn't really matter in the long run, but I love those little tidbits like that. They didn't have him talking in english to the man that taught him spanish, they just let him be.
To explain how much I loved this movie I am going to relate it to a scene in another movie that totally got to me. I know that most of you hate this movie for its unadulterated cutesiness, but you remember at the end of Cider House Rules when Tobey Maguire has gone back to the orphanage and he is putting the children to sleep and stands at the doorway and says "Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England," and he has this great smirk on his face and then the children giggle away when he leaves. I had the warmest feeling in the world in that movie and I got it thrice in this movie.
El Guapo signing out.
I hear this one’s pretty irresistable, and I can’t wait to get a chance to succumb to its charms myself.
"Moriarty" out.
