I dont feel like I’ve had a huge amount of success with movies lately, but I watched this one in the last few days and really enjoyed it immensely. I’d never heard of it before but I thought it was great. It’s the story of a guy who inherits a defunct isolated railway station when his boss dies from a heart attack. He happens to be a “little person”, and the story is about the relationships he forms with mainly two other people that he meets (and to lesser extent a third person).
He is a very introverted person, played brilliantly by Peter Dinklage, and develops friendships with these two people through the influence of one them, a hilariously gregarious Cuban guy who runs a hot dog and coffee stand outside the station. The other person is a divorced woman, played by Patricia Clarkson (who I don’t think I’ve seen before, but who was also excellent), who is mourning the death of her young son a couple of years earlier.
What is interesting about the story is the different ways that each of the characters, particularly Dinklage’s, experience the processes of forming these friendships, conditioned by their own particular idiosyncracies and insecurities. After initial tentative efforts at getting to know each other they suffer something of a falling out, and two of them attempt suicide, but in the end they forge renewed bonds. Very good acting all round. Great stuff.