POETRY IN MOTION
Beautifully imagined Paterson is ‘an echo, asking a shadow to dance’
We begin on a Monday. Paterson (Adam Driver), wakes, without an alarm, a little after six, next to his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). She tells him about a dream she had; that they had twins. He has a bowl of Cheerios, then walks to work at the bus depot on Market Street in Paterson, N.J., where he works as a driver on the No. 23, and where his colleague Donny (Rizwan Manji), complains about life.
At night he’ll go out to walk Marvin the dog (Nellie), straightening the mailbox that seems to keel over every day. He’ll stop at his local bar for one beer and some conversation with the regulars.
Tuesday comes, and things go pretty much the same way. He is like the bishop in Les Misérables, of whom Victor Hugo wrote: “An hour of his day was like a month of his year.” The biggest change from one day to the next is that Paterson is at work on a new poem. He is inspired by the little things in life, writing free verse about Ohio Blue Tip matches (though the real subject is love), or about the simple pleasure of having a beer at the bar, though he wraps that one in a rumination on multiple dimensions.
Open to inspiration, he finds it falls on him like rain. A little girl introduces herself as a poet, and reads him one of her verses. (It was actually written by writer-director Jim Jarmusch; Paterson’s poems are the work of Ron Padgett.) The ghost of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Method Man), practises rap in a laundromat as he passes by.
There are small shocks in his life, but they are just that. One night, a car stops at the curb, and the young men within tell him to beware of someone “dog-jacking” Marvin, but they roll on peacefully. One day his bus breaks down — though it does not “explode into a fireball” as some of the passengers seem to worry. And always he sees patterns — famous Patersonians, twins, secret notebooks, the foam at the bottom of a glass of beer. If this film were a poem (and I’d argue it very nearly is), these are its internal rhymes, its themes.
These tessellations even spill outside the frame of the film. Paterson (no one ever addresses him as anything else), is a bus driver, played by Adam Driver. Paterson was once a Marine; Driver too. The actor studied to become a bus driver before filming began. (No word on what he did for Star Wars.) When the lovelorn Everett (William Jackson Harper) makes a speech about heartbreak, the bartender tells him he should be an actor.
“I am an actor,” says Harper. He is. In the wrong hands, Paterson could be a mishmash of tired stereotypes — the wise, chatty barkeep; the flighty spouse — and name-dropping; find one other film that manages to bring up poet William Carlos Williams, boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, comedian Lou Costello, musician Dave Prater and anarchist Gaetano Bresci (all residents of Paterson, by the way).
But Jarmusch, who has always been something of a poet himself, has just the right temperament to carry this film, lightly yet resolutely, to a successful, joyously meandering conclusion. The film premièred in Cannes last May, where its only prize was the Palme Dog for its canine performer. (Well deserved; good dog!) But it has since appeared on many critics’ lists, and reviewers in the Hawkeye State named it Best Movie Yet to Open in Iowa, which could almost be the title of a poem itself.
The American writer Carl Sandburg once said: “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” That’s also a fitting definition of film. Paterson is at once a poem given celluloid (OK, digital), flesh, and a movie shaped by the style and structure of a poem. If it is also an echo, I urge you to be its shadow, and dance with it.