Tom McCarthy’s Bag of Tricks

I don’t have a laundry list of common traits for Tom McCarthy’s films – not like I did for Buster Keaton – although he does have a number of tools he regularly employs in his writing.  Instead, I’m focusing today on what I think of as the quintessential Tom McCarthy character dynamic.

I use The Station Agent for my template, since it’s the first film McCarthy wrote, as well as the first of his that I saw.  It’s in that movie that we see the prime example of what seems to be McCarthy’s preferred relationship arc.  Our protagonist is Finn, a softspoken loner who, upon inheriting an abandoned train depot in rural New Jersey, moves into it with the intention of enjoying the solitude.  However, his peace and quiet is disrupted by Joe, an exuberantly extroverted hot dog vendor with a passion for making friends, and Olivia, a lonely artist still struggling with a lingering personal tragedy.  Despite Finn’s insistence that he doesn’t want anyone in his life, his new acquaintances/friends slowly start making their way past his defenses.

This film, then, gives us our basic character formations.  We have the Finn, the Joe, and the Olivia.  Though the precise details of these characters’ personalities, meetings, and subsequent interactions vary, we see them repeat themselves throughout a number of McCarthy’s works.  Take McCarthy’s second film, The Visitor.  Walter, our lead character, is definitely a Finn.  A widowed college professor shuffling through a stagnant existence, Walter’s isolation weighs more heavily on him than Finn’s, but even so, he’s resistant to the unexpected new additions to his circle of acquaintances, a young immigrant couple (to be fair, that’s in part because he finds them squatting in his mostly-unused second home in NYC.)  Still, his loneliness spurs him to accept Tarek and Zainab’s tentative offers of companionship, and his life soon changes radically as Tarek introduces him to the djembe and the world of street drumming.  As a character, Zainab is a little more nebulous, but friendly, cheerful Tarek is undeniably a Joe.  Meanwhile, Tarek’s mother Mouna, who appears in the second half of the film, gives off some reasonable Olivia vibes with the gently-hesitant bond she develops with Walter in the midst of a tough time.

What really clinches the format me, though, is Up.  Even though every Pixar movie is obviously a major group effort and McCarthy is maybe the least significant of the film’s three writers, it’s essentially a fantastical adventure story about a Finn who’s surrounded by Joes.  Sad, cranky Carl has shut everyone out since his wife died, and he’s planning to spend the rest of his life on a patch of virtually-untouched jungle – can’t be much more alone than that!  However, Russell, a young wilderness explorer scout tenaciously pursuing his “assisting the elderly” badge, has other ideas.  Not only does the irrepressible Russell wind up accidentally stowing away on Carl’s adventure, he also starts acquiring new animal friends the second they arrive in Paradise Falls.  Russell is plenty Joe-ish, as is the pestery exotic bird Kevin, but Dug – a golden retriever fitted with an electronic collar that translates his thoughts/barks into human speech – is Joe all over.  I mean, “I have just met you, and I love you [platonically]” could pretty much be Joe’s life motto.

To be fair, the dynamic isn’t as pronounced in Win Win – with Mike and Kyle, you have some Finn- and Olivia-ish tendencies, but it’s less defined – and Spotlight really doesn’t use it at all (not that there’s room for it in the kind of story that film is telling.)  I also haven’t seen Million Dollar Arm or The Cobbler, so I’m not sure if we see these particular character interactions there.  But even just looking at the three films above, the pattern is clear.