Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in "Paterson". Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in "Paterson".
Paterson arrives like a warm embrace, its tenderness and compassion first inspiring the viewer to reach out and hug its characters, then the man who made it.
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch – who for three decades has personified indie-film cool and ironic detachment – this love letter to love and letters feels like a throwback and an improbably bold leap forward.
Adam Driver plays Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, who wakes up at 6.15 every morning, goes to work, eavesdrops on passengers, comes home to his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), walks their dog, stops at the bar for a beer, returns home, goes to bed, and starts all over again the next morning. Paterson is a creature of habit with the soul of an artist – he composes simple, carefully crafted poems which appear on screen while he works them out in his head – whereas Laura’s creative life is chaotic and ever-changing. One day it’s cupcakes, the next it’s country music. Whatever she’s obsessed with, Paterson unconditionally supports her.
There’s little narrative tension in Paterson. What becomes clear in the course of the movie is that Jarmusch has constructed his own version of a poem, with recurring images and themes that allow him to delve into the nature of commitment, artistic ambition and how inner life is shaped by place and history.
Laura knows her husband is a great poet, but he’s adamantly undriven. If Farahani’s Laura threatens to grow cloying with her boundless enthusiasms, Driver is her perfect foil, his hangdog features and physicality well-suited to Jarmusch’s talent for finding some of cinema’s greatest faces.
Lyrical and unhurried, Paterson finds Jarmusch attentive to the same straightforward visual composition and human foibles that graced such early films as Stranger in Paradise and Down By Law. (There are also dashes of his signature screwball humour, here delivered by Paterson’s bulldog Marvin.) But Paterson is characterised by a sincerity so disarming that at first it feels like it might be put on.
The Jarmusch fan may wait for the absurdist shoe to drop, but it never does. Instead, viewers are treated to a portrait of romantic devotion and vocation all the more affecting for being so utterly heartfelt.
Four stars. Rated R. Contains crude language. 118 minutes. – The Washington Post