Dwarves

Yesterday, I brought two DVD’s home from the video store: Bad Santa, a film recommended by an ex-girlfriend, and The Station Agent, a film I tried to drag you to on several occasions.

I watched Bad Santa first. It was occasionally funny, but mostly crude and unpleasant. It tried way too hard to be shocking.

Bad Santa is about two con-men, one of whom is a dwarf. Every Christmas, they work as ‘Santa and his Elf’ at a different department store. Then, on Christmas Eve, they rob the store’s safe by hiding the aforementioned elf/dwarf somewhere in the building and using him to disable the alarm system (and, yes, he has to do it in under 30 seconds!).

Much of the supposed humour comes from having Santa being…well, bad. He drinks, he smokes, he swears, he vomits, he pees in his jolly red suit and, when he makes love… let’s just say that he enters by the back-door rather than by the chimney. When Santa’s not doing that, he and the dwarf/elf exchange foul-mouthed insults.

I think the dwarf stuff is supposed to be funny: dwarf dressed up as tiny snow-mannequin; dwarf wriggling about in air vents; dwarf sliding down an escalator; dwarf dropping from ceiling; dwarf being kicked in the nuts; dwarf swearing. The problem is, I didn’t find the dwarf stuff amusing at all. In fact, I felt kind of sorry for Tony Cox, the little actor in question; you see, in the DVD Special Feature, The Making of Bad Santa, he laments the lack of good roles for dwarves, but praises Bad Santa by saying, “Roles like this just don’t come around, not in the 20 years I’ve been in acting.” If this is the best role in two decades, being a dwarf actor must be really depressing. Of course, the residuals probably help compensate for the frustration.

Then, I popped in The Station Agent. Now here’s the really odd thing, Beauty. Until the opening frame of the film, it had never occurred to me that, in a bizarre coincidence, I had yanked two ‘dwarf’ movies off the shelf. And to make it even odder, as I was starting The Station Agent, CityTV was playing Austin Powers The Spy Who Shagged Me; Verne Troyer, as ‘Mini-Me’ was running around doing the standard dwarf shtick (and, yes, Heather Graham reminded me of you although, I have to admit, you are considerably more attractive). The paucity of good dwarf roles is the subject of much discussion on the Internet, and is summed up rather nicely in this article in Backstage.

Well, The Station Agent is the antidote to all of this. It’s a really lovely film, Beauty. Patient, tender, unhurried, thoughtful and respectful. And the cinematography is gorgeous, especially since it was shot on Super 16 and made for a half a million dollars. I’m not sure if you are a fan of Michelle Williams, from Dawson’s Creek, but she is luminous in the film as the protagonist’s burgeoning love interest.

The film is about Finn, an anti-social and diffident loner whose dwarfism only adds to his self-consciousness and isolation. A railway aficionado, he works at the local model-train store until his friend, the store's aging proprietor, dies. In his will, the old man leaves Finn an abandoned railway station in Newfoundland, New Jersey, an isolated and bucolic part of the state. There, to his initial consternation, Finn attracts the attention, and affection, of a group of fellow loners: a garrulous Cuban-American who has taken over his sick father’s hot-dog truck; a scatter-brained artist who has separated from her husband and is still coping with death of her son; the local librarian whose boorish boyfriend has left her pregnant and alienated; and a local child who is both charming and alarmingly direct.

Although The Station Agent is partly about the detachment triggered by Finn’s dwarfism, it is also about the slow process by which friendships are forged, about finding love in the most unlikely of places and, I think, about what you have called effortlessness. I’d like to see it again, but this time with you.