Paterson (2016) dir. Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch takes a bus driver’s route and weaves a simple yet profound tale that is unremarkable in all the right ways.

After I reviewed The Night Porter, I started to get depressed.

I thought I was in for a nice Italian movie with a woman director, only to realize I was in way over my head. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good film, but after you’ve seen so many depressing and nihilistic films, you start to get tired. You just want to watch a series of characters going through everyday problems and not walk out of the theater traumatized.

Thankfully, I saw this film.

Paterson is almost absurdly simple in its premise: bus driver/poet Paterson (a magnificent Adam Driver) goes through a week in his life writing poems and going along his usual route. Meanwhile, his wife Laura tries encouraging him to share his poems with the rest of the world, except he’s quite shy and doesn’t see all that much potential in his poems. All the while, the people around him go about their usual business.

This is my first exposure to Jim Jarmusch, and now I get why he’s a revered figure in American independent cinema. You’d think it’d be easier to get bored watching a slice-of-life film about a bus driver who writes poems, but he pulls it off extremely well. He manages to capture the beauty of a sleepy American town that not many of us have heard of, while also not portraying it as a city full of sleeping geniuses. There’s a certain innocence around how the city is portrayed. You’d understand why the best person to write about Paterson is Paterson himself.

That’s because Paterson himself is like the city he’s named after. Twins are a common motif in the film, and you get the sense that Paterson acts as something of a stand-in. It’s hard to tell the two apart. Like the city, Paterson has a unique history yet has a sleepy present, with the potential for greatness. Yet he doesn’t want greatness; he just wants to keep living an idyllic existence while chronicling the small moments of beauty everywhere he goes. But the desire still lingers for him to share his words.

No one could have played Paterson like Adam Driver. If you’ve known him primarily as the screamy Kylo Ren or the screamy-but-only-towards-the-end Charlie Barber in Marriage Story, the mild-mannered yet quietly intelligent Paterson is a welcome change. He’s not the most talkative of protagonists, but Driver lets Paterson’s eyes say what he’s not. He’s also a believable everyman, one that you would at first describe as a blank slate before realizing he’s a lot more complex than you first thought.

The best parts of the film come from the worldbuilding, which is ironic because this is the last film you’d expect to come with lore. It’s no Lord of the Rings, but it’s a world where you can tell what happens onscreen happens everyday. The bartender always knows what beer Paterson is going to order. Paterson and Laura wake up at the same time without needing an alarm clock. And despite Everett, a patron of the bar Paterson frequents, coming off as a bit unstable at times, his interactions with the titular character show he’s been suffering quietly for a long time.

It’s hard to make a slice-of-life film engaging. Especially when it concerns a single week in the life of someone you’ll barely remember. But Jim Jarmusch knows how to find poetry onscreen without making it pretentious. The superimpositions he uses to convey the passage of time make the entire bus route seem like a kaleidoscope of memories and emotions. Laura’s eccentric circular patterns breath life and ambition into a working-class home. And when there’s an interruption on your bus route, it’s enough to make you think the world is ending. It’s hard to be a poet, even harder to call yourself one, but Jarmusch knows there’s a William Carlos Williams inside all of us. Just ask your local bus driver.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

• I know it makes sense for the film, but if I saw that many twins within the span of a week, I’d get incredibly paranoid.
• I really dig the color yellow in this film. Just an excellent earthy shade.
• It’s crazy Paterson was released a year after The Force Awakens, and then people who watched both had to reckon with the acting beast that is Mr. Driver.