Summer 1991: it was a brief experiment in independence, spending three months out in Sacramento working at a movie theater, and a single visit to a Baptist church “ex-gay” (don’t ask) support group sparked the spinoff of a trio whose subsequent nights spent together drinking wine, burning candles, and discussing profundities would constitute one of the fondest memories of my undergraduate years. In descending order of age, there was Alex, whose world-weary smile barely concealed a lengthy struggle with vague physical ailments; the Teva™-shorn Bob, whose concurrent criminal trial threatened both his daily enjoyment of the outdoors and his fragile Christian faith; and myself, whose enthusiasm for midnight runs along the American River and boundless pop-culture curiosity were nothing if not blissfully ignorant of the challenges that await young adults outside the ivory tower of academia.

There’s something to be said for the value of those ensembles that spring up at the unlikeliest times in one’s life, in their demonstration of man’s varying needs for social connections – and when most of us are often on the fast track toward romantic couplings and/or offspring, those days that “mere” friendship do us a world of good seem increasingly precious in retrospect. Maybe that’s the unique charm of Tom McCarthy’s The Station Agent, last year’s big winner at Sundance, and a refreshing change from the usual cinematic arithmetic that demands two characters end up sucking face.

McCarthy’s got another angle to his script that’s both conspicuous within the frame and largely incidental to the plot: Fin, Agent’s central personage, is a dwarf, a fact not lost on anyone who crosses his path. Here we finally have an instance of one of the little people not simply serving as cinematic window dressing (munchkins, oompah loompahs) or appearing to more grotesque ends (Tod Browning, David Lynch) – this is a character who simply happens to be of shorter physical stature – but though McCarthy refuses to make his physical difference the movie’s central concern (cf. Children of a Lesser God, Heavy, The Best Years of Our Lives), it seems few people in the movie can just let it go. Kids stare uninhibitedly, librarians jump, local hicks let fly “Fantasy Island” references, convenience store clerks grab their cameras – everyone has to react to his size in some way. It’s likely Fin endured a lifetime of everyone’s morbid fascination, and he can hardly be blamed for pursuing a fundamentally solitary existence.

Fin (Peter Dinklage) channels his energies instead to railroad lore – apparently there are clubs where people watch home-movie train footage – and he even works at a model-train shop in Hoboken until his boss drops dead and wills him an abandoned depot out in rural New Jersey. It’s the jackpot for antisocial folks, but Fin can’t be lucky enough to move in and be left in peace – just inches away is where the garrulous Puerto Rican Joe (Bobby Cannavale) daily parks his ailing dad’s hot dog truck (the oddest of locations one might hope for lucrative traffic – it’s not even a thruway) and, upon sight of the backwater’s newest resident, he gloms on almost instantly.

Joe’s a dynamo of nervous energy, as relentlessly social as he is remarkable simple, and Fin bristles at this near-constant intrusion on his domestic isolation. (Joe even tags along when Fin goes on his daily walks.) Joe’s nothing next to Olivia, however, who almost runs Fin over twice in the same hour with her SUV the day he moves in – and her subsequent guilt brings her to his door that evening, her chaos field almost immediately wreaking havoc on the interior and on Fin’s patience. Where Joe is uncomplicated, Olivia’s a medicated bundle of issues – her only son died in a playground accident, and her marriage is unraveling – and though Fin’s more than hospitable to every spontaneous visitor, his labored pauses before responding to their questions suggest it’s clearly an imposition.

Agent’s storyline weaves as much as Olivia’s driving with the daily give-and-take of social interactions, but the ultimate trajectory is to bring this improbable threesome together and then slowly pull them apart. After Fin finally drops his guard and warms to the spectacle of humanity drawn to his doorstep, they quickly start disappointing him – Joe pulled away by his sick father back in Manhattan, Olivia coping less and less with her loss – and with the rest of the townsfolk never failing to behave badly, Fin must once again deal with being the rejectee instead of the rejecter. (You’d think by now – he’s gotta be in his thirties at the least – he’d be inured to everyone’s insistence on treating him as a spectacle more than as a person, but McCarthy’s point is, if you’re human, it’s always gonna hurt.)

Agent pulls back on the drama and backstory as much as possible – for example, there’s never any mention of Fin’s own family, and when Olivia disappears, Fin simply hangs out on the curb for days hoping she might make an appearance – it’s a restrained approach that might prove too oblique for some audiences, but for others such an incomplete picture and lack of conventional catharsis mirrors life all too well. It’s possible that after the film’s events Joe, Fin, and Olivia will part ways as suddenly as they came together, but what matters is that the connection was yet possible – it’s like when Fin finally consents to speak about trains to the local grade school, and the students can only ask questions about his height – McCarthy gives no indication his speech went well or completely derailed, but the taking chances is all.

For platonic bonding you probably can’t beat the life of a seaman in the early nineteenth century, where the all-male crew of the H.M.S. Surprise (“197 souls” reads the introductory text, a virtual floating village) fulfill their commissions trying to delimit Napoleon’s ever-expanding aquatic empire. Their specific directive: pursue and ensnare the French privateer Acheron, a state-of-the-art vessel that vastly outguns their own, and prevent its entry into the Pacific by way of South America and therefore contain the battlefield’s dimensions. The Acheron’s hardly inclined to play the mouse, though, when its nautical and armamental superiority is better applied to the cat’s role, and the very opening scenes of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World finds the Surprise almost splintered apart by its quarry’s fog-veiled attack.

Director Peter Weir accomplishes in these initial scenes what any number of Douglas Fairbanks reels failed to communicate during the heyday of the swashbuckler: cannons are finally revealed as the bad-ass weapons they were meant to be. The Acheron’s artillery wreak holy hell from a comfortable distance, and the Surprise’s wooden infrastructure certainly does yield to the assault. (As the balls are moving too fast for the eyes to grasp, the sound effects accompanying these flying doombringers are the only clue something really bad’s about to happen.) Eardrums are concussed, limbs are lost, and an entire mast needs replacing after this single mugging – Weir firmly establishes the sense of fragility of even the best ships in the face of oceanic warfare.

There’s two hours yet to go in the film and already Master puts the lie to the romantic exploits by which Lord Nelson’s famous memoirs probably drew these blokes to the naval profession. Despite escaping into the fog crippled and taking on water below, captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe, festooned in some magnificent blonde locks) insists the ship be refitted and resume the hunt. “An aged Man of War? She’s in her prime,” he boasts of his ship, and the woodworking skills of his men are put to the test.

Master is essentially bookended by the two crucial conflicts between the two vessels, and the middle brings to life the daily labors and mini-dramas and diversions that fill a tarpaulin’s day, from spectating open-air brain surgeries to commerce with indigenous peoples to wine-saturated officers’ dinners to maintaining the web of ropes holding the whole shebang together. Crowe’s Aubrey conducts a sexton class for the pre-adolescent midshipmen training to follow in his footsteps, and plays violin to the cello of his best friend and ship'’ physician Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). All this continues even in the face of blustery tempests (as though furors of such magnitude were par for the course) in which the Surprise tilts at disconcerting angles and dips below waves that would make Sebastian Junger blanch. (It’s during these squalls that Master’s technical bravado finally falls short – between the gales and everyone’s accents, the dialogue is sometimes unintelligible. But maybe that’s the point?)

Despite the crudeness suggested by everyone’s gallery of scars (Aubrey himself sports a slightly mangled ear – it appears no one gets through this career path unscathed) the Surprise’s inhabitants are a more than capable bunch, and ever respectful of Aubrey’s command. Still, before the Acheron appears again there are plenty of inconvenient distractions that a more sophisticated crew might have avoided: in one subplot an underachieving and uninspiring officer-in-training becomes convinced he’s cursed, a contemporary Jonah whose presence on the galley is responsible for the Surprise’s sudden run of bad luck, and in another Stephen is accidentally shot by a careless lieutenant and has to operate on himself (thereby proving himself more man than anyone else in the entire Hemisphere). It’s the latter incident that compels Aubrey to give up the chase and drop anchor for a time at the famed Galapagos Islands so that his friend might recover, but it’s these same events that accelerate the story to its final skirmish, and their last-ditch stab at their prize “before peace breaks out with France, God forbid.”

Master adapts the “Aubrey/Maturin” series of novels of Patrick O’Brian, twenty books more than a little reminiscent of those arresting yarns from a hundred years ago that encouraged “healthy and manly development in young boys” with exploits of vigorous physical and intellectual adventure; so it’s no surprise that Aubrey might apply some of their naturalist discoveries in their final storming of their Gallic prey. It appears the element of surprise can work both ways, and the Surprise’s ploy sets the stage for a clash of muskets and swords between a foe with three times their numbers and an upstart that, for all they know, is all that remains of Albion. Our heroes’ losses are not unfelt nor insignificant, and the ending will be delightfully unexpected to some; and in any other year (in which hobbits weren’t saving the world) Master would be a shoo-in for Best Picture come Oscar® time by virtue of its breathtaking vistas, its palpable recreation of a bygone era, and its modest desire to simply tell a rousing and invigorating tale with all the seafaring intrigue many thought was cinematically played out over half a century ago. (Now, what if Aubrey matched wits with another famous Jack of the seven seas, Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow? Oh, the possibilities…..)