Review: Paterson

Every day Paterson wakes up next to his wife Laura, listens to her latest dream or her whispered sweet nothings, has a bowl of Cheerios, walks to work, and drives a bus. He listens to the conversations of his passengers, observes the streets and the people that he drives past, returns home, listens to Laura's latest flight of fancy, walks their dog, and indulges in a beer at the corner bar. And it starts all over again the next day, with little to moderate variation.

Jim Jarmusch's latest film, Paterson, is a hymn to the ordinary and to finding grace in the everyday. Indeed, not much happens over the course of the film, or things happen but don't really go anywhere. For fans of Jarmusch's work, this is par for the course. Jarmusch dwells, he lingers, as if he has all the time in the world to observe the most minute of minutiae. His infinite patience may try the most tolerant but, for Jarmusch, the seemingly nothing is exactly where everything happens.

Which is not to say that Paterson is solely a cinematic meditation. It is also an attempt to dramatise the act of poetic creation. For our hero is a poet, gleaning inspiration from his mundane surroundings, whether it be the Ohio Blue Tip matchboxes that lie about his house or a stray line he hears from a random encounter with a young girl, herself a poet whose style resembles his own. A line appears to him, and he nurtures it, refines it, adds to it, reassembles the words, contemplates the flow, listens to where the words want to take him - Jarmusch lets us both see and hear the words as they take hold in Paterson's mind.

The poems are Paterson's daily bread. Though Laura urges him to publish his poems, Paterson demurs - the writing itself is the reward. Seen from a different angle, Paterson could be regarded as a portrait of a man finding escape from the suffocation of his life - his loving but overly encouraging wife, who dominates their exchanges with whatever latest whim has crossed her mind (cupcake shop owner, country singer) and their home with her black and white decorations; the monotony of his waking life; perhaps even trauma from his time as a soldier (never mentioned, but Jarmusch's camera glances once or twice at a picture of Paterson in uniform). Whatever the case, the poetry serves as a mirror image to the world around him.

Doublings are a running motif in Paterson, from the name shared by the protagonist and the city in which he lives to the pairs of identical twins he comes across to the very structure of the film itself, which is essentially one vignette that is twinned several times. Even the casting of Adam Driver as Paterson is a callback to John Lurie, who served as either actor, composer on both on Jarmusch's career-defining works. Like Lurie, Driver has a face full of unexpected angles and oddities that the camera loves to explore and a cool, but not too cool, sensibility that meshes well with Jarmusch's own. He delivers an entrancing performance, all the more remarkable because passivity and simplicity are more challenging to make compelling.

Paterson

Directed by: Jim Jarmusch

Written by: Jim Jarmusch

Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, William Jackson Harper, Chasten Harmon, Barry Shabaka Henley, Masatoshi Nagase