[This may seem a little long, but it is carefully made. If it is still too long for you, as Jim Carrey's character Ace Ventura said in Ace's first movie, “Why don’t you cry about it, Saddlebags.”]
The independent movie The Station Agent (2003) merits a few observations, not simply because part of it (at a picturesque railroad depot) was filmed about 25 minutes from my home.
Isn’t New Jersey just a small state geographically, loaded with more than its fair share of pompous loudmouths than any other U.S. state? Isn’t New Jersey more of an urban or semi-urban area (and tract housing) than anything else, with little in terms of natural wonders, or history, culture, or tradition tied to geological resources? Isn’t it a lifeboat of sorts overloaded with too many of the more banal versions of de Tocqueville’s assessment of Americans as “eager, anxious men of small property”?
In more recent years, when considering leaving the state for good, I have thought of New Jersey and its negatives as being like a rather unhealthily lumpy bed: you need to get into something else lest it do you harm after a while, but you’re too used to it to think of living anywhere else.
New Jersey may seem a hard place to appreciate in the sense that one’s home “province” is an evocative environment that can appeal to a broad array of outsiders, insofar as it can mean a lot in terms of the world of culture and values that we carry around with us no matter where we live after we leave our hometown or home state. If we’re from England or Greece , or Chile New Jersey
A film limns a novel association of strangers
The Station Agent is a quietly realistic and comic film released in 2003, made in 2002-03, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, previously (and still?) an actor, whose parents (as far as I know) live in Union County, N.J. The film’s locations are towns mostly in Morris County and nearby locations—picturesque locations that suggest a rural area with remnants of old-time railroad business. The main focal setting is an old train depot that, per the movie’s obviously fictional story, is inherited, and moved into, by a young man named Finbar McBride, played by Peter Dinklage, an actor with (today) various films on his resume and who is originally from Mendham, in Morris County.
Dinklage’s being a dwarf provides a dimension to Finbar’s story that seems almost tastelessly obvious from a certain sensationalistic aspect, which is exploited a bit in the story (such as how passersby crassly joke about him on the street). On the other hand, this feature provides a launching pad for more subtle observations that serve the story’s more sincere purpose, which centers on how newly dislocating life circumstances, which give cause for grief, impel us to both new positives and new negatives, according to the circumstances and to our character.
The story is not so much about a dwarf from a city area—Hoboken—where he didn’t quite fit in either, who moves to a romantically railroad-featuring rural area where he makes do while still seeming like a fish out of water. It is, rather, about the balance of a need for solitude on the one hand and social engagement on the other (even if this latter happens accidentally and with mixed results), or about the two-edged sword that intertwining suffering and solitude is. And this happens with two, or possibly all three, of the main characters. Early in the story, Fin is both grieving the loss of his friend and employer Henry, who runs the hobby shop in which Fin works and dies early on; Henry is who willed the train depot to Fin.
Then, Fin meets Olivia Harris (played by Patricia Clarkson), this by happenstance (one of the few hokey points in the story, featuring Olivia’s comically careless driving). She is a middle-aged woman who is still grieving the loss of her young child, two years after his death, while enduring a strained relationship with her husband, from whom she is separated. Olivia “self-medicates” with alcohol and prescription drugs while seemingly dilettantish in working on art in her lakeside getaway home, and Fin makes the rounds of his new hometown, in the way someone newly grieving can go through mundane motions even while trying to become acquainted with a new home. His preference is to have his solitude in the depot to which he seems somewhat exiled.
These two grieving people, challenged to balance the salving value of solitude with the value of social involvement that happens along, are complemented by the third major character, Joe Oramas (I’m unsure if this is the correct spelling; played by Bobby Cannavale, recently the focus of noted stage work in the New York metro area). Joe is a complement to these two despite his seeming joie de vivre that is consonant with his extraverted Cuban nature and insistently ingratiating urban-flavored bonhomie (he is from Manhattan). Joe is himself in exile because of having to man his father’s hotdog-vending truck, parked as it happens a short distance away from Fin’s depot.
Not quite as much as Fin or Olivia, he is grieving in his own way, dealing with the vexations of caring when he can for his father, who has some unnamed serious illness. By being in physical proximity to Fin and being the street vendor who serves “café con leche” to such random patrons as Olivia who freely stops by him, Joe is in a good position by virtue of observation and his more sociable manner to become an enabler of spontaneous, ad hoc, how-can-it-hurt social relations between the three characters.
This leads to all of them enjoying the best each has to offer in passing mutual support—the type that newly acquainted strangers can give each other when recognizing a new sense of bereftness in each other—as well as to them eventually rubbing each other the wrong way, due to their respective different styles and inclinations in suffering what each is suffering. Things climax in relation to Olivia’s making a suicide attempt in response to the news of her husband’s opting to have another baby, at which Fin, after being persistent about trying to maintain his social connection with a newly withholding Olivia, plays a key role in getting her help.
The story has a range of supporting players, notably a young local librarian, Emily, played by Michelle Williams and a black schoolgirl, Cleo, played by Raven Goodwin (herself from Washington, D.C., and an actor with only one other film under her belt at the time), who has her own naïve but supportive way with Fin.
A movie’s mythical distortions? New Jersey as a melting pot, and the real Newfoundland
Those who don’t live in New Jersey and who look at the scenery of the film in its railroad-related settings and occasional early-twentieth-century housing, and think this milieu seems more like the Midwest or West than New Jersey, might think it is rather implausible that a motley crew of a dwarf, a city type like Joe, a black girl like Cleo, and miscellaneous others could be jumbled together in one local community. But this isn’t a bad symbol of what New Jersey is like.
Actually, the real Newfoundland is a mere hour’s drive from New York City, which amount of time is a good commute for some people in this town and surrounding areas, and there certainly is a variety of people in terms of backgrounds in an area like this: (1) people who grew up here, (2) transplants from the city or more developed suburbs, (3) some who dress like what city denizens might call hicks, and (4) so on. And as what some might regard as a sort of resort, places not far from Newfoundland fit the bill: areas of Jefferson Township and large parts of nearby Sussex County all started as, or were near to, resorts or developments for summer housing for people whose main homes were nearer to, or in, the city.
Even today, the picturesque countryside in northwestern New Jersey still serves as a “Western-like” getaway for city dwellers, for whatever purpose, whether an invigorating snowboarding afternoon in January at the small-bore ski resorts in Vernon Township, or a water-park day trip in the summer. Or (longer-term) it can contain a new home for whatever real-life correlates of Fin there may be, or more average middle-class types who move to the area from more expensive areas closer to the city, hoping to gain from the perceived lesser expense,
Director McCarthy’s films feature odd setup, with fine payoff; and grand improvisation
The first two films McCarthy has directed contain a setup that is a bit implausible—The Station Agent isn’t too bad in this regard. Meanwhile, The Visitor (2008) has an odder setup, though I hasten to say that like The Station Agent, it is a film that is quietly dramatic to the point of a tone poem, while it gives a good flavor of the walkabout texture of white-collar people’s life in New York and was an occasion for lead actor Richard Jenkins’ deserved Oscar nomination. In The Visitor, the ultimately appealing illegal-alien characters are (plot-wise) artificially brought into Jenkins’ professor’s life by having been fraudulently rented his unused city apartment. But this set-up is a springboard for a more credible and a creditable look at human relations, in terms of how, in The Visitor’s world, character traits and consequential choices coupled with socioeconomic standing tend to condition and engender, as in the world of The Station Agent, more creative and supportive moves, and emotional enrichment, during an accidental association combined with mutual aid, especially in (again) a time of grief.
But The Station Agent makes even more of its rather bucolic setting, which not only contains the somewhat totemic railroad motifs that are associated with Fin’s avocation/love but also background greenery, lush late-summer cricket song, and the deep black of country summer nights. The general rural setting seems to trumpet that it is inevitably more of a palliative (and a sort of stimulating occasion for spontaneous social development) than an accidental home of insufferable hicks and suburban brick-heads.
What especially draws me to re-view The Station Agent isn’t simply how a well-made small-budget film can do so much with a promising story, and limited resources but a lot of production imagination and heart, but how it tries to make an evocative story “about the heart” out of local places in what some of us (even myself, at times) may consider the seemingly cold-hearted state of New Jersey.
For one thing, as movies so often do, this one “constructs” its fictional Newfoundland out of several actual New Jersey towns: the celebrated depot is actually in the small municipality of Newfoundland, and is viewable from the much-traveled State Route 23 (whose traffic can be glimpsed a bit in some shots in the movie), but other locations are in other towns. The library, which McCarthy mistakenly says in the DVD commentary is in Newfoundland, is in the small (also quaint) town of Hibernia, several miles away, down Green Pond Road, which is in real life the road that the depot is on (and is more viewable in the movie than is Route 23), not, per Joe Oramas’ fictional reference to it, up the road and where Olivia lives.
Some scenes were filmed in Rockaway Township and in Dover; Olivia’s house is in Lake Hopatcong. And other locations were used, one or more not in New Jersey
Green Pond RoadRockaway Township Newfoundland Hoboken to Newfoundland
Green Pond Road
People from the real Newfoundland would understand this, knowing how movies construct realities, while they are probably flattered and tickled to see their township immortalized in a nationally distributed movie. It is interesting to me that the localities the movie uses, which I readily admit are picturesque, are synthetically sewn into a larger fictional entity. For my own purposes, fiction should have an important mimetic aspect; since I did my boldest work in 1986, the rare times I do fiction, I try to hew to reality as closely as possible, partly because I feel this gravitates the most to beauty that art should contain and also, from a more moral angle, is most apt to capture the reality, the beauty, complexity, and ambiguity, of human relations. The more you make your art follow the color and intricacies of real situations (some of which you can have a devil of a time piecing out), the better your art, and I think the better you are for it, both as an artist and as a person apart from your art.
Sumptuousness in a tiny-budget film
And do you think the movie makes New Jersey seem like, in its natural features, closer to the Philippines than it really is? I think The Station Agent, perhaps despite what Tom McCarthy wanted to capture, gets this aspect of the state, or this element of an esthetic strategy, down well. In sum, if I were to set a movie in New Jersey
There was a lot more I said in a piece that was originally conceived as a print article, but I think I’ve said enough to recommend this film. Also, if you can get the DVD version, watch it not only without actor commentary, but then with. The three main actors (Dinklage, Cannavale, and Clarkson) are joined by director McCarthy in a fun and friendly burbling of comments that’s like having a group of cool friends over for a rousing movie night.
[Edited 2/22/12.]
[Edited 2/22/12.]
