“The Station Agent,” DVD, 22 April 2005 (2003). This is a tough film to describe. It’s also a pleasure to watch. It is sly, smart, civilized, and very humane. A very lovely, small American independent film that follows Peter Dinklage’s Fin, a very isolated dwarf with a personal and professional interest in trains, as he inherits a shack of a train station in rural NJ. There he meets Joe and Olivia, Bobby Canavale and Patricia Clarkson, the former a loquacious hotdog vender, the latter an artist mom who’s lost her son in a fall. It’s a very, very good movie that is touching and invigorating. It doesn’t have the tightest ending in the world—an alternate ending is one of the outtakes and they were right to leave it out despite the flaws in the conclusion as it stands—but the film is really worth the watch. The acting by all three of the principals is fine, and Canavale is especially endearing; the only exception among the secondary characters is a little girl who delivers her lines as though she were reading them. And Dinklage is a pleasure. I’ve not been thrilled with acting by ‘little people’ who seem to be chosen because they’re small. Dinklage can really act!. The film was, a friend who knows him has told me, written for and around him. He’s a real talent who should go far in film. See this one.