Paterson
Directed by: Jim Jarmusch
Written by: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Rizwan Manji, Barry Shabaka Henley, Chasten Harmon, William Jackson Harper, Method Man, Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Sterling Jerins, Masatoshi Nagase
Comedy/Drama - 118 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 1 Jan 2017
Written by: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Rizwan Manji, Barry Shabaka Henley, Chasten Harmon, William Jackson Harper, Method Man, Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Sterling Jerins, Masatoshi Nagase
Comedy/Drama - 118 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 1 Jan 2017
Film festival audiences clap at the end of films. It’s what they do. Many times it’s polite clapping and at the Cannes Film Festival, the cinema elite are known to heartily boo or even applaud for minutes on end. The crowd I watched Paterson with at Virginia’s Middleburg Film Festival did not clap. It was the last of five movies I saw that day, ended close to 11:30 at night, and I witnessed much lesser films earlier receive generous clapping approval. This audience did not like Paterson, at all. Perhaps they went because they like Adam Driver from his time on Lena Dunham’s Girls or as the evil Kylo Ren from Star Wars. I secured a place because it is a film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, one of the most challenging filmmakers out there. Paterson is a mesmerizing think-piece; visual meditation at its most leisurely and methodical.
Mainstream audiences lack the chops to understand how to experience Paterson. If an inexperienced jazz listener, say Emma Stone’s character from La La Land, sat down to absorb top tier jazz for an evening, she could not distinguish average from great. The audience I experienced Paterson with was not familiar with Jarmusch as a filmmaker. They interpreted the deliberate repetition and slow pace as boredom instead of poetic rhythm. The conversations Paterson eavesdrops on during his bus route and at his bar were slapdash instead of catalysts for his next poem. The crowd also missed two witty Easter Eggs, one a cheeky homage to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and one a knowing nod to Jarmusch’s great 1989 film Mystery Train for in a way Paterson is to Paterson, New Jersey what Mystery Train is to Memphis, Tennessee.
Mainstream audiences lack the chops to understand how to experience Paterson. If an inexperienced jazz listener, say Emma Stone’s character from La La Land, sat down to absorb top tier jazz for an evening, she could not distinguish average from great. The audience I experienced Paterson with was not familiar with Jarmusch as a filmmaker. They interpreted the deliberate repetition and slow pace as boredom instead of poetic rhythm. The conversations Paterson eavesdrops on during his bus route and at his bar were slapdash instead of catalysts for his next poem. The crowd also missed two witty Easter Eggs, one a cheeky homage to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and one a knowing nod to Jarmusch’s great 1989 film Mystery Train for in a way Paterson is to Paterson, New Jersey what Mystery Train is to Memphis, Tennessee.
Paterson (Driver) is a blue collar, lunch pail toting bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey. Yes, his last name matches the town he grew up and resides in. Jarmusch shows us a week in Paterson’s life marking time with the days of the week which pop up on screen when Paterson wakes up a few minutes before his alarm clock goes off every morning. We are introduced to the routine, and by day number seven, we know as much as Paterson knows what comes next. Paterson’s routine has a pulse, a deliberately-paced scheme matching his poetry. During his bus route in and around Paterson, he listens to construction workers talk women, wannabe anarchist teenagers talk the future, and notices life’s peculiar details nobody else sees.
During his lunch hour and after work, Paterson transposes his daily experience and observations into a new poem. Many of these words are printed onto the screen as Driver recites them in voiceover. The poems are not Jarmusch originals, but are donated by the poet Ron Padgett. I am no poetry purist and only have a couple undergraduate courses under my belt to help me break them apart and digest them for meaning. I lack the poetry chops to know if the poems are groundbreaking or run of the mill, but I know Jarmusch’s presentation of them and how they morph from twinkling idea to flowing words are genuine.
The conversation snippets Paterson listens to remind of Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes, a collection of wry vignettes all set in one beaten down coffee shop. Paterson pulls ideas for his poems from his life on the outside; from those people and events he just happens to run across during his daily cycle. At home, his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani, Exodus: Gods and Kings), is not necessarily Paterson’s muse, but a source of true love and domestic contentment. Laura spends her days hopping from artistic lily pad to lily pad. One day she wants to learn the guitar and become a Nashville country star and the next day she believes her baking skills can become a steady business venture. She challenges Paterson as his most ardent believer. She urges him to publish his poems and not in a plastic, 'I have to say this because I'm your wife' way; she knows her husband is man curating and devoting the necessary attention and space to his gifts.
Paterson’s locale and influences allude to William Carlos Williams, the famous New Jersey poet whose collections and epic poems feature the town of Paterson, New Jersey and its inhabitants. Paterson communes nightly at a local bar cracking wise with Doc the bartender (Barry Shabaka Henley, Carrie) and keeping notes on a heartbroken man (William Jackson Harper, True Story) trying to salvage a relationship while his ex-girlfriend (Chasten Harmon) aches to put it all in the rearview mirror. Director of Photography Frederick Elmes (Horns) bathes Paterson the town in seven respective sunrises and sunsets. He unobtrusively follows Paterson’s bus from within and around as it meanders through town. In a smart move, Adam Driver went out and learned how to drive a bus obtaining his commercial driver’s license so he could focus on dialogue and atmosphere rather than fumbling with gauges and knobs.
Paterson’s life is a ritual; it’s on autopilot. Perhaps the most inconsistent variable is his English bulldog, Marvin, who tolerates Paterson only so much as he is the entity who takes him on his evening constitutional. Paterson listens. His body displays passivity as he drives the bus and nurses a beer at the bar, but he actively listens. Audiences may mistake his daily habits as frustratingly repetitive and let their minds drift while they should be actively taking it all in as much as Paterson is. Hence the disconnect. If the observer classifies detail as boredom, rather than as preparation and process for poetry, the end credit silence is a failure on the audience instead of the creator. Hollywood trained contemporary audiences to tune into plot and the conflict the protagonist must overcome to achieve the goal. Jarmusch does not play that game; Paterson and those orbiting his New Jersey existence operate on a level requiring a more free-form poetic license instead of ordered prose.
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