Paterson
(2016)
(SPOILERS) Spoiling a movie where nothing much happens is
difficult, but I tend to put the tag on in a cautionary sense much of the time.
Paterson is Jim Jarmusch at his most
inert and ambient but also his most rewardingly meditative. Paterson (Adam
Driver), a bus driver and modest poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, is a
stoic in a fundamental sense, and if he has a character arc of any description,
which he doesn’t really, it’s the realisation that is what he is.
Jarmusch’s picture is absent major conflict or drama; the
most significant episodes feature Paterson’s bus breaking down, the English
bull terrier Marvin – whom Paterson doesn’t care for but girlfriend Laura
(Golshifteh Farahani) dotes on – destroying his book of poetry, and an
altercation at the local bar involving a gun that turns out to be a water
pistol. And Paterson takes it all in his stride, genial to the last, even the
ruination of his most earnest, devoted work (the only disappointment is that
Marvin doesn’t get dog-jacked, although Jarmusch undercuts such expectation of eventfulness
throughout).
One might see Paterson as something of a pushover, as it’s
quite clear he’ll do anything Laura asks of him; he even has the route of his
walk dictated to him by Marvin. There’s no urge to confrontation there, though,
as if he is the same passive observer of his home life as he is of passengers
on his routes “Do you think there are any
other anarchists in Paterson?” one student asks another, to Paterson’s wry
amusement). His poetry reflects this unswerving, ordered mundanity, focussed on
the least arresting of topics, the small details (“We have plenty of matches in our house…”), and yet finding a
hypnotic, methodical beauty in them; his routine existence informs and enables
his creative life.
At first, I was unclear if Jarmusch intended us to regard
Paterson as skilled at his chosen recreational pursuit – poetry is, after all, one
of the most subjective of artistic endeavours, particularly given its minority
appreciation – being as there are pointers on the way, such as the girl he sits
with to wait until her mother returns, whose words affect him profoundly and
suggest her as talented and literate beyond her years, making Paterson aware of
his own fragile talent. But he is belying in his modesty, and Jarmusch invests
in his creative technique as that of a true artist (we experience his developing
compositions through repetition and subtitling, as the craftsman whittles his
words to their final form, Driver’s tones imbuing them with steady, unmoderated
rhythm).
If Paterson is quietly dedicated to his solitary art, Laura
is a sexy, passionate screwball alighting on all manner of different
endeavours, somewhat reminiscent of Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters; she wants to develop a cupcake business and
has interior decorated their home to varying degrees of success (there are
several dog paintings on the wall that even Paterson can’t disguise his lack of
enthusiasm towards). The sense is of one harmlessly deluded over their
abilities, and who knows their other half will capitulate to their every
coquettish demand (“You really need this
guitar?”), yet she actually is competent
at the guitar almost immediately, and her cakes go down a storm (when Paterson
doesn’t finish one earlier in the film, you suspect they’re lousy). Laura
announces “I have a very strong visual
style” which is certainly true, consisting of painting black and white
circles on curtains and gradually spreading the same colours everywhere,
including her clothing.
Her lack of aesthetic compass is most clearly signified by
her decision to make a Cheddar cheese and Brussel sprouts pie on impulse (the
effect of which is to send Marvin into a stupor and require Paterson to drink
gallons of water). Despite this, Jarmusch isn’t depicting a flawed
relationship, requiring the worm to turn; they’re both endless supportive of
each other. Paterson isn’t nursing pent up aggression towards Laura, and she’s
the one who has been, unsuccessfully, attempting to get him to make copies of
his work (as to why she doesn’t copy it for him, well, it’s his work). In his book of poetry, he
confides “Pumpkin… if you ever left me…
I’d tear my heart out and never put it back”
Paterson: It’s okay. They were just words. Written on
water.
Perhaps there’s nothing Paterson needs to set right. Perhaps
his lack of ambition in any regard is a talisman of fortitude, his contentment
with just being. It is only really the loss of his notebook that brings him
down, and by the synchronicitous workings of the universe he receives another
at the very point when he is sees no reason to continue with his pastime (“Sometimes the empty page presents more
possibilities” he is told). Synchronicity and mundanity – and encyclopaedic
knowledge of local icons and obscure pursuits of more famous ones – featured
strongly in Jarmusch’s last picture, the superb Only Lovers Left Alive (which also depicted strangely barren urban
environs). That was through the filter of bored immortality, but Paterson is all about finding satisfaction
in the little things.
Japanese Poet: May I ask if you too are a poet?
Paterson: No, no. I’m a bus driver myself. Just a bus
driver.
Quite what the twins motif amounts to is unclear – Jarmusch
said “the film is about things not being significant”
so it suggests pursuing that line of thought would be flogging a dead horse – but it recurs, from Laura’s dream of their
having twins, to the twins in the bar and on the bus, to the poet girl’s sister,
to Paterson’s reaction to Kathleen Burke in Island
of Lost Souls – “You look like her,
you could be twins” he tells Laura – and Jarmusch may be suggesting, consciously
or not, a sense of opposition and duality.
At the same time Laura has success with her cakes (making
two dollars less than the cost of her guitar), Marvin destroys Paterson’s notebook,
announcing his failure. Paterson encounters fellow poets, as if by magic, wherever
he goes (the rapper in the laundrette, the girl, the Japanese tourist with the
notebook, who has visited the city because of its famous poet William Carlos
Williams) who serve to underline the importance of his activity. Paterson, who
maintains unaffected acceptance of his unvarying daily rotation in the face of
Donny’s problems and Everett’s heartbreak, is brought (relatively) low by Marvin’s
destructive act as the universe strives to maintain a balance. But, as Everett
(William Jackson Harper), offers, seeking to console him, “The Sun still shines every night and sets every evening. Always another
day”. “So far” admits Paterson.
Japanese Poet: Poetry in translation is like taking a
shower with a raincoat on.
Paterson
(laughing): I see what you mean.
Jarmusch also observes a quiet synchronicity through humour,
such as the repeated response regarding the potential danger of the broken-down
bus to its passengers (“Damn, they could
have exploded in a fucking fireball”). But his pictures have always been
quietly funny (“Sabotage, probably” suggests
a child passenger regarding the incident), except when Benigni has been on hand
to create an uproar. It goes without saying that Driver is great, the unfeigned
flipside to his immodest hipster manipulator in While We’re Young, and Farahani matches him beautifully, both
irresistible and impossible as his endlessly-motivated other half. A word too
for Barry Shabaka Henley as the most classic of approachable bartenders.
Paterson ends with
Monday rolling round again, seven days, its title character having resumed his
poetic path as he muses on Swinging on a
Star and how “Or would you rather be
a fish” was only that line in it that spoke to him “As if the rest of the song didn’t have to be there”. Which reflects
Paterson’s acceptance of his own life; that it is what it is, and striving to
make it something other won’t help matters. Out of quiet contemplation comes
meaning. Paterson is an exponent of art for art’s sake, not for its acceptance
by others or his own consequent self-gratification. Which seems to be its Jarmusch’s
essential ethos too, albeit one bound by the practicalities of financing (he sees
Paterson as cinema in poetic form,
although unlike his poet, he writes only one draft of his script, then hones
the picture in the editing room). Whether or not Paterson’s is talented – and
Jarmusch evidently thinks he is; I’m sure he could have written him as a bad
poet if he so wished, although cynics of the form might suggest it would be difficult
to tell the difference – it becomes irrelevant when he is his own audience and
critic.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.