Dinklage has some of the emotional activity even at rest that is one of Daniel Day-Lewis's most magnetic qualities. In other words, he carries himself like a leading man and in addition has such a vigorously masculine high style that I immediately started picturing him in the 19th-century repertory of works featuring physically stunted characters. Stylistically they cover the range from realistic, sympathetic treatments to allegorical Gothic horror, including Philip Wakem in George Eliot's Mill on the Floss (available online); Walter Scott's Black Dwarf (available online); Rigoletto, which Verdi's librettist derived from Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse; Poe's "Hop-Frog"; and Quilp in Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop. It isn't that Dinklage should play only characters who match his physical type, but that he has a creative power as an actor that calls to mind great imaginative writing. (Of course, currently he'd have a lock on them in terms of casting, and several of them would give artistic vent to his plainly simmering anger.)

That is to say, you want to see him in something really good. There's much more excitement in Dinklage than McCarthy's pressureless movie allows him to show. He hasn't yet been asked to give a performance to compare with Billy Barty's in John Schlesinger's adaptation of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust (1975), but you feel he's more than up to the job. In fact, unlike Barty he does not come across as a supporting actor but as a star.

And finally The Station Agent does not just let Fin be the man he is with no thought of his stature. That's how Fin wants to be treated, and implicitly how he thinks of himself, but since it isn't how he is treated, the issue of his size is always present. The movie's pathos may be unstated but it's central to the meaning. What we see is that Fin's way of dealing with the pain of being reacted to as an oddity is to withdraw from all human contact, in that symbolically isolated station house. Trains to him aren't a means of going anywhere they're just a way to occupy his mind, an interest not even an obsession. Fin is drawn out by Joe (Bobby Cannavale) and little Cleo (the preternaturally self-possessed Raven Goodwin), who won't leave him alone, and by Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), to whom he reaches out as she, too, isolates herself to numb herself to pain.

What the movie shows is that by putting yourself in a position to avoid the depths, you miss out not only on the heights but much of the pleasure to be had on the level plains as well. Fin isn't the only one who learns something--he teaches Bobby that loquacity isn't the only way to connect with your friends. All in all it's a fairly simple demonstration of some plain truths about life. The end product may fairly be called "wisdom" but the process is not very dramatic. And as subdued as that process is, it does belong in the category of pathos. (It is not, at any rate, an example of pseudo-naturalism, like Todd Field's In the Bedroom (2001), which despite its handling has the narrative structure of melodrama.) Dinklage, like McCarthy, never milks the pathos, but he also doesn't seem fully engaged. You can feel his emotional-expressive muscles tensing for the release that would be possible only in a more extroverted movie.