In short: Paterson (2016)

It is difficult to talk about Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson without making it sound like a precious, pretentious and condescending piece of pap, seeing as it concerns itself with the poetry of everyday life and everyday people and the beauty hidden in the quotidian; but that’s mostly because this sort of thing is incredibly difficult to pull off and seems to draw the filmmakers least able to actually do it the most, so there are quite a few terrible films – usually made by the sort of arthouse director who never met an everyday person in his life – sitting around as bad precedents.

Jarmusch, however, pulls this thing off without even looking as if he’s trying. Paterson, mind you, isn’t a “realist” movie, so there’s little in it of the kind of thing that makes one want to kick the world and its collective inhabitants in their stupid heads. Instead, this is a film about the quiet joys of overheard conversations, love that is strong and deep and at least partly based on tolerance instead of being a dramatic kind of love, the small sadnesses and defeats that are just as real as the loud and dramatic ones, and an idea of art that’d find the concept of outsider art deeply confusing because it’s really the insiders making art that stand at a distance to the world as people inhabit it.

Because this is Jarmusch, the film is full of little bits of strangeness - strangeness that in Jarmusch’s view clearly is just as everyday as is driving a bus for the film’s main character – and chance encounters.

Of course, things never really cohere into a plot when the film follows bus driver Paterson (Adam Driver), his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and their dog Marvin (Nellie) through a week of their life. It’s not a week in which nothing happens, but it certainly isn’t one dominated by any pressing need to follow a classic dramatic structure. Rather, Jarmusch shows the sort of flow of life that once might have inspired dramatic structures.


The director has by now become highly proficient at this kind of slow exploration of people and places, and where some of his early films had moments where their deliberate slowness felt like the director consciously striking a pose of breaking narrative rules, here (and in quite a few of his other films) the film’s habits and structure are nearly natural expressions of the things it is about. Paterson’s also genuinely funny, but that’s just life if you think about it from a certain angle.