Stationed At Home had its world première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 7 Mar 2025
Writer/director Daniel V. Masciari’s Stationed At Home opens with a forlorn image: the bleak exterior of a bungalow at night, snowbound in the middle of nowhere, and engulfed, like a solitary planet, in darkness. Inside it is somewhat less desolate, as Ralph (Erik Bjarnar) wakes up for his night shift and feeds his beloved cat, while listening to big band jazz on the radio. As the DJ (Scott Williams) can be heard suggesting that this Christmas Eve is a time “to take a step back and reflect on the meaning of love, life and the infinite heavens above and beyond”, his reference to the starry realm is not merely a metaphor. For it is 1998, and bright and early on the following Christmas morning, the International Space Station is, like Santa, scheduled to pass visibly overhead, as a beacon of human connection and collaboration in what can otherwise seem an indifferent or even hostile universe.
Inspired by a cherished Christmas memory of his long-dead, star-gazing mother and her injunction to “always look up”, single, late middle-aged Ralph is looking forward to getting his telescope out and watching the celestial event – but first he must ferry other lost souls in his cab through Binghamton, New York State. Like Ralph himself, these strangers on their journeys through the night must negotiate where they fit and where they want to be in the cosmos.
There is Harry (Darryle Johnson), recently dumped by Cynthia (Misty Monroe) for his waywardness, and spending a semi-reluctant night of cheap pleasures with his conspiracy-minded friend George (Peter Foster Morris) and the coke-snorting, apparently fugitive outsider Jack (Jeff DuMont), while thinking about the daughter back home with whom he would give anything to be. There is another outsider, the veiled Elaine (Eliza VanCort), checking into the local hotel – with its “off-limits” basement – for an evening of writing and mystery. And then there is local shoe magnate Stanley (Eric Kincaid Endres), who seems unsure whether his girlfriend has moved to Helsinki because she likes it there, or just because she wants to get as far away from him as possible.
As the considerate, taciturn Ralph takes his various fares from here to there, and looks increasingly unlikely to make it home for the grand spectacle in the sky, he finds himself getting tangled up in bad choices and other people’s dramas, while also repeatedly crossing paths with local cop Joe (Alek Osinski). Yet despite scenes of drunkenness, strip-club temptation, a car chase and even rumours of a serial killer in town, Stationed at Home remains a gentle, genial ride into darkness. This all comes written very much in the key of Jarmusch. Jack looking out at Earle’s Pork Emporium opposite and improbably declaring “Beautiful city” is like Eddie from Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) insisting that an icy, barely visible Lake Erie is ‘beautiful’ (against all available evidence), and that Cleveland is a “beautiful city”. The jazz soundtrack and Jackson Jarvis’ crisp monochrome cinematography certainly help cement this impression, although in fact the plotting is more reminiscent of later, full-colour Jarmusch joints like Mystery Train (1989) with its trio of lost boys on the town, or Night on Earth (1991) with its taxi-set trips. And like the last episode of Night on Earth, Stan’s references to Finland evoke the underdog escapades of Jarmusch’s friend and fellow traveller Aki Kaurismäki, who like Masciari foregrounds the misadventures of lonely, down-on-their-luck proletarians.
Meanwhile Elaine’s overnight stay in the old-school hotel with her dusty typewriter in tow – the film’s most oneirically otherworldly section, although there will turn out to be a good reason for that – recalls the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991). Stationed At Home presents “a sad and beautiful world” (as Roberto puts it in Jarmusch’s Down By Law, 1986), all at once wryly funny and deeply melancholy, as everyone counts their losses in life and tries to find a little human warmth in the cold or light in the darkness. For in this bittersweet cross-town odyssey, everyone is in the gutter looking at the stars, and yearning for what has been left behind.
strap: Always look up: Daniel V. Masciari’s bittersweet debut sends a cabbie and his customers on a Christmas Eve trip into cosmic melancholy
© Anton Bitel
