Paterson
Jim Jarmusch (2016)
The title refers to the principal character and to his home city. Paterson (Adam Driver), whose forename we never know, hails from and still lives in Paterson, New Jersey. He’s married to Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). They are childless but have a bulldog named Marvin. Paterson is a bus driver and an unpublished poet. He writes during his work breaks and at home whenever he can. His poetic hero is William Carlos Williams, whose best-known work includes the modern(ist) epic Paterson, published over a twelve-year period (1946-58). This five-volume poem is an account of the history, people and spirit of Paterson, NJ. Williams was born elsewhere in the state but his medical career was based at (what was then) the Passaic General Hospital and he spent plenty of time in Paterson, the largest city of Passaic County.
When Paterson gets into conversation with a young schoolgirl (Sophia Muller), who also writes poems, she asks if he likes Emily Dickinson and Paterson replies that Dickinson is one of his favourites. The last thing the girl says as she bids Paterson goodbye and gets into her mother’s car is, ‘Wow – a bus driver who likes Emily Dickinson!’ Although he’s too self-effacing and undemonstrative a man to react strongly to the child’s remark, we can tell from Adam Driver’s face that Paterson is stung by it. William Carlos Williams is famous for combining a professional career as a doctor with a writing life but a bus-driver poet is, to many people, an oxymoron. A persistent problem I had with Jim Jarmusch’s new film was that it seemed to be expressing a view akin to the little girl’s. It kept nagging at me that Jarmusch wouldn’t have made a movie about Paterson if he only drove a bus and didn’t concoct nice-verging-on-twee little love poems to his wife. (It made me grateful all over again for Manchester by the Sea. Kenneth Lonergan doesn’t feel the need to make his janitor protagonist a cultured soul inside his blue collar.)
Paterson comprises a week in the life of its main man, from early one Monday morning to the next. The daily episodes illustrate the strongly routinised nature of Paterson’s world. He wakes and rises early. He eats the same breakfast cereal. He listens to his bus passengers’ conversations. He jots down lines for poems as he sits eating his packed lunch alone. In the evening, he takes Marvin for a walk and goes for a drink at a local bar. But an unvarying routine is necessarily something that a character on screen – and the film-maker who has created her or him – must break out of, sooner or later. Jim Jarmusch doesn’t describe Paterson’s procedures in the same detail or at the same length as Chantal Akerman describes Jeanne Dielman’s. The climactic rupturing of routine isn’t comparably startling: in Paterson’s case, more or less normal service is eventually resumed. Even so, as the weekend approaches, Jarmusch introduces changes to the normal pattern and their effect is mildly ominous. Paterson wakes several minutes later than usual on the Friday morning. Later that day, the bus he’s driving break down mid-route. He isn’t at work Saturday or Sunday but still wakes quite a bit later than he intended on the first of these days, by which time Laura is already preparing to set off for the big event of her week, going to sell homemade cupcakes at the local farmers’ market.
Jim Jarmusch’s lack of formal rigour à la Chantal Akerman has advantages beyond making Paterson easy to watch compared with Jeanne Dielman. Jarmusch can pick and choose which details to make diurnal. A couple of times, Paterson makes the mistake of asking Donny (Rizwan Manji), a colleague at the bus depot, how things are, and receives a long moan in reply; when Donny asks Paterson how he is, the answer is ‘Fine’. The joke isn’t up to much first time around and its repetition is as tedious as Donny’s litany – after which Jarmusch wisely drops it. The evening meals that Laura cooks – innovative and highly unappetising – are dealt with similarly. However, too much of the (modicum of) incident in the film seems to take Paterson by surprise, to an extent that rather undermines the sense of a life lived within fixed parameters and steeped in repetition. The rate at which Laura redecorates their small home makes you wonder if she repeats the exercise on a weekly basis. In the bar, Paterson, for such a regular, doesn’t seem familiar enough with the stalled romance between two other habitués, Marie (Chasten Harmon) and the self-dramatising Everett (William Jackson Harper), and isn’t already aware that the wry, seen-it-all bar owner Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley) is also a henpecked husband.
Jarmusch doesn’t give Paterson any backstory. There’s a photograph of him in the house in what looks to be military uniform but no further reference is made to this. When he and Laura wake on the first Monday morning, she tells him about the dream she’s just had, in which they were the parents of twin babies. Paterson responds, rather oddly, ‘One for each of us’. Unless I missed it, there’s no suggestion that the couple can’t have kids of their own but their childlessness also remains unexplored throughout. It’s a relief that Laura’s relating her dreams isn’t a daily occurrence but her garrulous kookiness – which her husband seems to find occasionally exasperating but mostly endearing – proved a hindrance to my enjoyment of the film. Laura is a designing woman in a new and horrifying way, with a particular penchant for black and white patterns. The choice of items on which she expresses herself is sometimes amusing – fruit in Paterson’s lunchbox, Marvin’s collar, the spare tyre for the car – but the wall-to-wall effect of her creativity in the home is increasingly claustrophobic. So is the effect of her voice.
She sometimes seems as self-preoccupied as Donny but Laura clearly loves Paterson and urges him to try and get his poems published. She discovers during the course of the week that she shares her name with an all-time-great poetic muse and suggests that Paterson take photocopies of his work while she’s out at the farmers’ market but her technophobe husband fails to do so. Flush with the success of her cupcake sales, Laura insists they go to the cinema that evening (a black-and-white movie, needless to say). When they return, Marvin, while unusually home alone, has reduced to shreds the notebook in which Paterson writes his poems – a case of the dog ate my life’s work. (The somewhat artful arrangement of the shreds on the floor suggests that Marvin may also have taken a leaf out of his mistress’s book.) On the Sunday morning, a dejected Paterson goes for a walk and ends up in a favourite spot, on a seat overlooking the Passaic River waterfall. He’s joined there by a Japanese academic (Masatoshi Nagase) whose enthusiasm for William Carlos Williams has brought him on a pilgrimage to the area. The two men have a brief, friendly, halting conversation. When the Japanese asks if he himself is a poet, Paterson says no; yet the visitor leaves him, as a parting gift, a virgin notebook. This scene is very well played. Its curious blend of consolation and mystery, although contrived, is emotionally effective and welcome.
The poem the little girl reads to Paterson is also inspired by the waterfall: he only has to hear the child recite it once in order to commit lines from the poem to memory. It seems surprising, then, that, when Laura asks to hear her favourite William Carlos Williams poem (you know it’s bound to be the one about the plums), her husband can’t oblige without looking it up and thumbing through pages in a book before locating it. ‘This is Just to Say’ is a very short poem – a total of twenty-eight words – but thumbing through a book is what people usually do in a film on such occasions: in this respect at least, Jim Jarmusch is conventional. It’s fortunate for him that his lead actor is so persuasive. You believe in Adam Driver as a driver, in his Paterson as a man with Paterson in his soul and to whom poetry matters. The combination of Driver’s long, sad, droll face and vocal wit is very engaging. He keeps this charming but thin and flawed film going strong for longer than it deserves. He also receives excellent support from the dog – proper canine acting, since Marvin is played by a bulldog bitch called Nellie. Sad to say, Nellie died before Paterson premiered at Cannes this year but she was a thoroughly deserving (and the first posthumous) recipient of the Festival’s Palm Dog award.
1 December 2016