‘Garfield’ fun for kids but bland overall

In theaters

GARFIELD, directed by Pete Hewitt, written by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, 85 minutes, rated PG.

The best thing about the new Garfield movie is the computer-animated short that proceeds it. It’s called “Gone Nutty,” and it stars Scrat, the beleaguered squirrel from 2002’s “Ice Age,” who is still trying like hell to save his nuts.

As directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, the film is funny and inventive, telling its story without words and getting big laughs thanks to its calamitous situations and Scrat’s snowballing despair.

Its appearance before Peter Hewitt’s “Garfield” does the movie a great favor. It warms up the audience and gets them howling, which proves a blessing for “Garfield,” as that movie needs all the goodwill it can get.

As written by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, who based their script on the comic strip by Jim Davis, “Garfield,” on one level, is exactly what fans of the strip expect: it’s genial and familiar, offering the occasional mild chuckle in an environment that can’t help feeling a bit stale thanks to the strip’s longevity.

What isn’t so familiar is what Hewitt and his screenwriters have done to Garfield (voice of Bill Murray). For some reason, they’ve given him a conscience, which he most certainly doesn’t have in the strip, and featured him in a plot that finds him reacting to the budding love affair between his owner, Jon (Breckin Meyer), and veterinarian Liz (Jennifer Love Hewitt), while trying to save his archenemy, Odie, after the pup is dognapped by an evil television reporter (Stephen Tobolowski).

The story is bland and workmanlike – week-old catnip that has lost its bite.

What saves it is the animation, which is set amid a live-action world and which is extremely well-done.

With the exception of a few real animals, whose mouths are digitally enhanced to move as they talk, Garfield is the film’s only computer-animated character and he’s a well-crafted wonder.

A real fat cat, Garfield moves with the realistic heft of a Rubenesque kitty. Most impressive is his fur, the texture of which is perfect, and his oversized eyes, which pop, roll and react to every pseudozinger and manufactured situation as if it were original material. Sometimes, with his constant mugging, you almost believe it is.

The film will appeal most to young children, who will warm to it in ways that their parents won’t. There’s a reason for that. This is indeed a movie for kids – sly innuendoes and risque doubletalk are kept to a minimum. The movie exists to please only one age group, and while its makers could have done it all better, I’ll take “Garfield” any day over last year’s other cat flick, the woeful “The Cat in the Hat.”

Gone Nutty – Grade: A

Garfield – Grade: C+

On video and DVD

THE STATION AGENT, written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, 88 minutes, rated R.

Thomas McCarthy’s “The Station Agent” is the story of Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage), an intellectual dwarf whose life has been shaped by a world eager to ridicule him. He’s a man of few words, reluctant to make personal connections because of the disappointments that have often accompanied them.

Initially, the film’s quirks are driven by Finbar’s awkward interactions with people, but it gradually becomes something you don’t expect – a story about the necessity of friendship and the risks it can take for some to plunge into it.

The title is derived from Finbar’s interest in trains. He loves them, studies them, and then – by the sheer happenstance of an unexpected inheritance – finds himself living near them in an old train station in Newfoundland, N.J.

It’s there that he meets Joe (Bobby Cannavale), a jovial, lonely lug who for weeks has been tending to his father’s lunch truck while the man recuperates from illness. It’s also there that he is nearly run down twice by Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a distracted local artist whose marriage fell apart after the accidental death of her son.

If it weren’t for the rambunctious, extroverted Joe, who has the sort of rare, affable personality that’s hard to resist, “The Station Agent” might have been a silent film, such is the depth of Fin and Olivia’s need for solitude and quiet.

For the first half of the movie they don’t enjoy much of either, with Joe endlessly trying to fill the space between them with words. But as the movie unfolds and these three fall into an unexpected friendship, it’s the silences that come to define them and the movie, with McCarthy understanding that the best relationships are those in which the pressure of talking for the sake of talking doesn’t exist.

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at RottenTomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.