The Station Agent

The Station Agent (2003) is a quiet drama with a comic streak you can watch online on iFILM. It marked Tom McCarthy's directing debut and Peter Dinklage's breakout lead role.

Fin McBride is a man with dwarfism who is tired of being stared at and pitied. He barely speaks and lives for trains. When his only friend dies, Fin inherits an abandoned rail depot in rural New Jersey and moves there to be left alone. Solitude doesn't last. A talkative hot dog vendor named Joe (Bobby Cannavale) keeps turning up, and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a painter carrying her own grief, crosses his path again and again. Three strangers slowly become a kind of family.

McCarthy builds the film out of small things: walks along the tracks, long silences, conversations that go nowhere and somewhere at once. Michelle Williams and John Slattery appear in supporting parts. The film won the Audience Award at Sundance and put Dinklage on the map. Stream The Station Agent (2003) online on iFILM.