Jim Jarmusch charms with his latest film about the quiet life of a burgeoning poet.
Jim Jarmusch is one of the most unique and enigmatic filmmakers to emerge from America over the past several decades. With cult classic films under his belt like Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai and Broken Flowers, he’s one of the more unpredictable writers and directors of his generation and this year he returns to the big screen with Gimme Danger and Paterson. Where the former is a rock ‘n roll documentary about The Stooges, the latter is a compassionate and sublime film about the life of a quietly brilliant poet living as a bus driver in present day Paterson, New Jersey.
Adam Driver plays the titular bus driver, who in between his driving shifts and during his lunch breaks comes up with new, beautiful poems each day in his notebook. And that’s about it. There’s nothing else to the plot of Paterson, and it’s in the film’s simplicity that it finds its occasional magic. For every day of the week, we watch Paterson through each step of his life. From waking up next to his girlfriend, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), to driving around town on the bus, taking his lunch break by the town’s local waterfall, coming home to Laura, and then taking Laura’s grumpy dog for a walk to the bar so Paterson can have his nightly beer and conversation with the bartender, Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley).
Like most of Jarmusch’s films, Paterson stubbornly rejects any structural or storytelling norms, determined to tell this refreshingly straightforward story about the simple life of an aspiring poet, going through each day of his life, and dealing with both the usual good and bad cards he’s dealt. There are some occasional changes to Paterson’s daily routine, like when he stops to listen to a rap from one of the town’s citizens (played with an understandable amount of swagger by Method Man), or when one of the bar’s most frequent visitors pulls a gun on his ex-girlfriend. Where that latter moment might have been treated as the film’s climax, however, it’s given the same amount of importance by Jarmusch and the actors as one of the conversations that Paterson hears on the bus. These are just the things that happen. Nothing more.
It’s that kind of avoidance of any real plot or dramatic importance that also makes Paterson drag at times, unfortunately, near the middle of the story's week. While the attention to detail can make Paterson’s daily routine more interesting and enthralling than it really has any right to be, there’s also a sense during some of the more mundane days of Paterson’s week where you almost feel like the film is just going through the motions, much like the wheels on Paterson’s bus. Jarmusch’s tendency to keep going back to old jokes can lead to them hitting with varying degrees of success as well, like the film’s constant visual jokes about Laura’s obsession with black and white color combinations.
But watching Paterson, I was surprised by how tense of an experience it was, since it is unabashedly a movie where nothing really huge or dramatic happens. It was only upon reflection that I realized it was my own, preconceived ideas about movies that had made Paterson such a terrifying, almost heartbreaking movie to watch at times. For instance, when more and more quirks about his life that he clearly didn’t like began to be revealed, I waited in tense anticipation for Paterson to eventually explode around those that populated his life… Why? Jarmusch hadn’t done anything, after all, to make me think that anything like that was going to happen. There was nothing even in Adam Driver’s performance, which is gloriously understated, to make me think anything other than the exact opposite of that.
That’s why Paterson is such a quietly subversive film though. It’s not interested in the big issues that cinema usually deals with, rather in the small moments of our everyday lives that feel big to us. There’s a very likely chance that the repetitive and quiet nature of Paterson won’t be for some moviegoers, who will inevitably feel bored by it for the very reasons that they may also be intrigued by it in the first place. At the same time, it’s clear Jarmusch wasn’t interested in making a movie for them either.
So if you’re ready for a film that doesn’t prescribe to the standard storytelling tropes and cliches most other films about burgeoning artists fall into, I think you’ll find Paterson to be a charming and cheerful theatregoing experience. Nothing more, and nothing less.
The Verdict
Paterson is one of the most kindhearted films you’re likely to see this year. It certainly won’t provide the kinds of thrills or spectacles as some of the other awards season films it’s being released alongside, but its dedication to characters and attention to detail elevate it to being one of Jarmusch’s most unique and charming films to date.
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