A Nearly Personal Brush With Fame anecdote: Recently my spouse and I were watching television and an advertisement for Thomas McCarthy's film THE STATION AGENT came on. "I know that guy", my other half said, "I used to see him at the 7-11 in Fort Lee!"

That guy is Peter Dinklage, and he's about to become a Very Big Star through the terrific word of mouth being spread about his performance as would-be train chaser Fin McBride in this lovely, modest, dare I say it -- little film. I guess I'm allowed to say it, since at 4'10" tall, I have barely five inches on Dinklage, though he's a far better actor than I could ever hope to be.

Dinklage is Fin McBride, a rather glum young man who just wants to be left alone, since most of his interaction with the human race consists of curious stares and called-out comments about Mini-Me and hoots of "de plane, de plane!". Fin has one interest: trains. So when he inherits an abandoned train station in Newfoundland, New Jersey after the death of his employer and only friend Henry Styles (Paul Benjamin), his employer at the Golden Spike model train store in Hoboken, and having noplace else to go, he moves into it. Much against his will, he finds himself inexorably drawn into friendships with Joe Oramas (Bobby Cannavale), the preposterously garrulous young Cuban-American who runs a coffee truck near the station, and with Olivia Harris (Patricia Clarkson), an artist and and divorcee trying with dubious success to recover from the death of her young son.

As a character study in the connections people yearn for just when they think human contact is the last thing they want, THE STATION AGENT actually succeeds at what Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation only thinks it's doing -- conveying an unlikely relationship among people with nothing in common except being in the same place at the same time. Fin McBride's worldview isn't as cynical as that of Bill Murray's Bob Harris, but the Chaplinesque slump of his shoulders in the early scenes of the film, as he walks along seemingly abandoned railroad tracks towards an uncertain future, is similarly that of a man so lonely that he no longer realizes his isolation and merely wants to be left alone -- until forced out of his solitude through nothing more than the simple attempts at connection from two equally troubled people.

Writer and first-time director Tom McCarthy wrote this film for his friend Peter Dinklage, and there's no question that not only is this Dinklage's movie, but also that there is absolutely no reason a dwarf with this kind of presence can't be a leading man rather than the walking jokes that until now were often the only roles available for people who just happen to have been born with dwarfism.. Cannavale's Joe, who at first seems to be your conventionally testosterone-driven overgrown adolescent, is impressed with Fin's seeming prowess with the ladies, for both Olivia and librarian Emily (Michelle Williams) seem smitten. But to the viewer there's no secret, for while Dinklage is obviously unusual-looking, he's fascinating in a way that has nothing to do with his dwarfism. He's had small roles in films in the past, and can currently be seen as the inevitable angry Santa's helper in the Will Farrell vehicle Elf, but in THE STATION AGENT, not only does he break out of the "dwarf actor" role, but he just happens to give one of the best performances of the year. It's a subtle, layered, nuanced, yet QUIET performance that conveys a lifetime of emotions in this character so that we feel we know him intimately in the mere hour and a half of the film's running time.

Dinklage is backed up by note-perfect supporting performances that are also generous in their function as foils to the main character. We always expect a great performance from the marvelous Patricia Clarkson, and here she does not disappoint, even if this character has many similarities to her role as Frances Conroy's hippie sister on Six Feet Under. Raven Goodwin, last seen in Lovely and Amazing, has an effective role as a local schoolgirl who seems completely unfazed by Fin's stature, once she learns that he's not in any grade, for he's done with school. But the revelation here is Bobby Cannavale's Joe, who unfolds the layers of his character's puppylike macho to reveal a generous heart and a surprising depth.

THE STATION AGENT will undoubtedly be compared with Ken Lonergan's 2000 directorial debut, You Can Count On Me, another exquisitely character-driven little film that put a dynamic young actor on the map. But whereas Lonergan's characters seem in some ways to be stuck in the same isolation at the end of the film as they were when they started, McCarthy allows his to grow and blossom, without ever stepping over the line into treacle.

I love, love, love this film. If going to the movies can be said to be sitting passively, watching actors pretend to live lives that don't exist, then I can't imagine three nonexistent characters I'd rather spend time with -- again and again.

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