In the misnamed independent short subject 'Lost in Transportation'--it should've been called 'Meet Joe Schlepp'--director, writer, star Joe Hansard plays one of those people you encounter every day of your life but rarely even see: Joe Schlepp's the non-person you don't sit next to on the bus, the person you're stuck behind in the checkout line who wants to have a conversation with the clerk, the guy who precedes the roll of your eyes with his friendly smile.
Joe Schlepp is the guy you don't even know exists if your day's going well. And the conceit of 'Lost in Transportation' is that not only does he exist; he dares to have hopes, and dreams and feelings, just like you.
In the film, Joe's the guy who finds lost luggage at BWI. He got his dead-end job through the kindness of his best friend--you get the feeling that it's also his only friend--Fred. It's pretty clear that Fred hired Joe so he'd have somebody to look better than in comparison, and the role is played to smarmy perfection by the top-billed Fred Strother: You despise him almost on sight.
Joe has a chance encounter at the airport with 'Miss Randallstown,' a small-time beauty pageant winner he's recently seen on television, and her simple kindness ignites his dreams: Joe mistakes her common decency for possible romantic interest. He's never encountered decency before, and is uncertain what it is. Miss Randallstown is played with a sort of wide-eyed, innocent appeal by Joy Haines: She's a country dear caught in the big city's headlights.
'Lost in Transportation' takes a premise that's been around since Chaplin's 1915 'The Tramp'--and probably even before then--and gives it a shaking nobody even knew it needed: Chaplin's no longer believable in his old role because hardly anyone can imagine not liking him on sight.
Hansard, on the other hand, is instantly believable in his role as Joe because you can imagine him slipping under your radar. He seems, in the role, like the kind of person you might find yourself avoiding, and his glum voice-over narration, with a kind of 'kick me again' fatalism, seals the pact: Within the first minute of the 16-or-so-minute short, we're inside his head. As Walt Kelly once noted in his 'Pogo' comic strip, 'We have met the enemy and he is us.' Or as Joe Schlepp phrases it, 'Sometimes nobody yells at you; when that happens, it's a very good day.' It is indeed, Joe.
'Lost in Transportation' is billed as a comedy, and by a strict definition of the word it is. But in a much broader sense, the film misses the mark and instead hits another, more difficult, target: Poignancy.
