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Review (from the vault): The Station Agent

THE STATION AGENT

When four feet five inches tall Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) takes up residence in Newfoundland, New Jersey, it quickly becomes apparent that the townspeople haven’t seen many dwarfs. On his first day, Fin walks to the local convenience store, and just as he’s reaching for a carton of butter, the old lady owner snaps his picture, with a camera she appears to have ever at the ready, like a mini-market Diane Arbus. Fin pauses in surprise, and then continues shopping, seemingly nonplussed, a man long resolved to the inherent weirdness of the tall.

          Fin’s mentor at a Hoboken model train shop died a few weeks ago, and much to Fin’s surprise, left his assistant a tiny plot of land in Newfoundland, upon which sits the town’s now obsolete train depot. Neither Fin nor the actor playing him gives much away, not at first anyway, but Fin is probably thrilled. He’s a trainman. Late at night, he lies on his bed (an old couch) and listens to the them roaring past his new home, heading for elsewhere. Their weight and clatter makes the sofa bed tremble, and although writer-director Tom McCarthy doesn’t linger, it seems likely that Fin doesn’t shut his eyes until after those cars have rattled past, until he’s sure the trains are still running on time.

          For Fin, there’s important restoration work to be done—a lifetime’s worth — and yet people — and who needs them? — keep knocking at the station door. First, and most persistently, like a gnat you can’t swat away, comes Joe (Bobby Cannavale), an adorable, can’t-sit-still, won’t-shut-up Cuban who parks his ailing father’s hot dog truck outside the depot everyday and who desperately wants a pal. Joe’s benignly hot for the haunting Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), who is so klutzy and distracted that she nearly runs Fin down, twice in the same hour. Initially, Fin isn’t any more forthcoming with her than he is Joe, but Olivia’s persistent too, and one night, over a bottle of apology wine (for almost running him over), she tells Fin that her little boy died two years ago. At the news, Fin stares, stunned (Olivia: “Could you not look at me right now?”), for here is someone with more of a right to sadness than he, and that, I think, is the moment Fin reengages with the world. Suddenly, he’s needed.

Despite a flurry of melodrama in the third act, not much happens in this movie, except that three people form a bond, for a lifetime, or maybe for just right now. Either way is fine. Joe, always talking, keeps trailing along behind Fin, pretending to love trains too, until, suddenly, he does. Olivia, whose husband has left her, keeps giving them rides home, and soon, they’re a trio, walking the tracks. And one day, to fulfill a dream of Fin’s, he and Joe take Olivia’s video camera and that lopsided tin can hot dog truck and go racing alongside a speeding train, like storm hunters pursuing a tornado. Fin, riding shotgun, proves to be a lousy cameraman and accidentally turns the camera on himself, forever capturing a glimpse of his own face — eyes wide, soul thrilled. Joe’s beside him, driving wildly, and whooping and hollerin’ like a cowboy roping his first steer. The pursuit is a rush, but mostly, Joe’s happy because he’s made Fin happy. They’re friends. It’s a quick flash of a scene, and yet, watching those two — so ecstatically engaged with life — I thought, Oh. This is what I’ve forgotten, and what Joe knows instinctively: Joy doesn’t just come. Sometimes you have to chase after it. You have to meet it halfway.

Chuck Wilson

Review: Shirley

SHIRLEY

The late Shirley Chisholm is having a moment. The first African American woman elected to Congress, and the first woman to run for president of the United States, Chisholm, who died in 2005 at the age of 80, is the inspiration for Shirley, a compelling but dramatically stilted docudrama starring a superb Regina King. The Netflix film continues an unexpected small-screen Chisholm boon, beginning with Udo Aduba’s vibrant depiction of her in an episode of the Cate Blanchett series Mrs. America and continuing in Hulu’s recent History of the World: Part 2, which finds an exuberant Wanda Sykes starring in a sitcom called Shirley!

Sykes bursts into song as Chisholm attempts to win over delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, an irreverence that isn’t available to King, who must play it straight, per writer-director John Ridley’s determinedly intense reenactment of the convention’s tumultuous behind-the-scenes events. In focusing on Chisholm’s presidential campaign, Ridley, who wrote 12 Years a Slave, as well as the brilliant ABC series American Crime, which also starred King, sacrifices the details and range of Chisholm’s life and accomplishments, a choice that makes for a film that often struggles to find the personal in the political.

Shirley opens in 1968, as the 43-year-old New York state assemblywoman is elected to Congress. Each day, in her first week, she’s stopped in the rotunda by a Southern congressman. He’s a newcomer too, but can’t resist taunting her with the same observation, “Imagine, you making 42.5 like me.” There’s a world of contempt in the way his voice comes down hard on “42.5,” but he’s not prepared for Chisholm to answer him with her own sharp enunciation of the number. He slinks away, abased, however briefly. It’s a small moment, but one of the few in the film that offers a chance to see Chisholm squaring off, with her trademark wit and ferocity, against the institutional racism she must have encountered every day of her political life.

In a beat, three years pass and Chisholm has been petitioned to run for president by her constituents, who’ve raised a bit of money to get her started. She assembles a team of advisors, including her stalwart friends Wesley McDonald “Mac” Holder (the late Lance Reddick) and her head of finance, Arthur Hardwick, Jr. (Terrence Howard), as well as a former aide named Robert Gottlieb (Lucas Hedges) who agrees to be her youth coordinator. When she tells him she’s running for president, Gottlieb exclaims, “Right the hell on, Mrs. C.”

Not many in power support her — not the Congressional Black Caucus, or the leaders of the women’s rights movement. But on the road, Chisholm finds adoring crowds among people of color and among college students eligible to vote for the first time. Along the way, she takes on a young protégé, Barbara Lee (Christina Jackson), a Black activist (and future Congresswoman) who didn’t believe in voting until she met Chisholm.

In a movie overstuffed with men, Jackson and King spark off one another, and share one of the movie’s best scenes. Lee keeps pressing Chisholm to attend a Black political convention in Gary, Indiana, but Chisholm keeps refusing. Frustrated, Lee demands to know why. “They have made it clear they don’t care what Black women have to say,” says Chisholm. “That’s just how they are.” “They?” Barbara asks. “Men,” Chisholm replies. “Always plottin’ and plannin’.”

This is Ridley’s central theme, just as it was for Chisholm. It’s the endless machinations of powerful and wannabe powerful men, white and Black alike, that will prove to be the undoing of Chisholm’s daring last-minute bid to gain a spot for her platform at the ’72 Democratic National Convention in Miami. The road to that disappointment, filled as it is with arcane delegate math, is not completely gripping, but there’s beauty in the light that fills King’s face as Chisholm lists all that will be possible if they’re able to influence George McGovern’s administration. Afterward, her voice catches, as if she can’t believe she dared voice her truest dream.

It is in these small gestures that King finds Chisholm, even when it seems as if the screenplay itself is losing touch with her. It’s a deceptively physical performance. Shirley Chisholm walks and sits with her back straight at all times, but late one night, she comes home from the campaign trail to find that her husband (Michael Cherrie) hasn’t thought to leave her any dinner. She pulls a frozen dinner from the freezer and then sits at the kitchen table, too tired to put it in the oven. Leaning right, she takes off her glasses, crosses her leg, leans her head into her chin and falls asleep, a working woman in a plain kitchen, catching rest when she can, just like the women she grew up with, and like those she hopes to represent in the White House.

Chuck Wilson