Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Station Agent
2003 · Tom McCarthy · The Station Agent on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice where the camera sits in relation to Finbar. (camera)
Oliver Bokelberg takes Finbar's sightline as the default height, so rooms and streets are composed at his scale instead of looming over him. Natural light, unfussy framing, no angle that makes a point of his body.
Payoff: The film's whole ethic is settled by lens position. It watches him without editorializing about him.
Watch Finbar stand still and watch a train go past. (performance)
He sets up trackside with a camcorder and does nothing while a freight fills the frame and roars by. Dinklage plays the whole film this way, guarded and watchful, built out of small thaws.
Payoff: He does not travel. The world travels in front of him while he holds his ground, and that is the pleasure he came for. In the reading: movement of the world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still and the world does the moving instead.
Count how many strangers look at Finbar too long. (staging)
Shopkeepers, children, people in a bar. McCarthy stages the stares plainly and never milks them, and lets you see Finbar square his shoulders and keep walking.
Payoff: Being constantly looked at is shown as a daily fact rather than a lesson, and the film hands the camera to the man usually on the other end of it. In the reading: cinema of the body. The reading calls these postures the body carrying a social fact, saying what no line of dialogue could say without cheapening it.
Count the seconds after a conversation stalls. (cutting)
Tom McArdle lets scenes run past where a normal comedy would bail. The pause stays in. The bad small talk stays in. Three people slowly getting used to each other is given its actual duration.
Payoff: Both the humor and the sadness live in the held time. Cut it sooner and you would lose them together. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). The reading calls these stretches dead time: passages where nothing advances the story and the everyday simply gets held.
Listen for the train horn where music would normally be. (sound)
Stephen Trask's acoustic score arrives rarely and never underlines a feeling. What fills the track instead is rural quiet, passing freight, and the dead air of awkward conversation.
Payoff: Solitude is made audible. No cue tells you when something has been funny or when it has hurt.
Once you have seen it
Count the problems the film solves by the end. (structure)
There are almost none. The events are walks, drinks, a film night for local kids, small ruptures, small repairs. Olivia's grief is not cured and Finbar's reserve is not cancelled.
Payoff: Acquaintance changes people sideways and partially, by accumulation. The screenplay refuses to arrange a fix.
Watch Joe when nobody is talking to him. (performance)
Cannavale plays him needy, warm and relentless, parked by a road with a hot-dog truck almost nobody visits. The chatter is constant and the loneliness underneath it is always visible.
Payoff: The friendship reads as real because all three are short of company, not because one of them is generous.
Look at what each of the three keeps around them. (setting)
Trains and railroad memorabilia for Finbar, the cart and the roadside for Joe, paintings and a car she drives badly for Olivia. Each object is where the person has been storing something.
Payoff: The film reveals people through their possessions and their habits instead of through backstory, which it almost entirely withholds.
Notice how the three sit when they are together. (staging)
Trackside, on the steps, in the truck, on lawn chairs. McCarthy blocks the friendship scenes with an informality that puts all three at the same level, in contrast to the encounters with strangers.
Payoff: The difference between being stared at and being sat next to is built into where the bodies are placed.
Carry this in: Stand still by the tracks with him. The film is built out of watching, not out of anything anyone does.