Until this week, Paterson, New Jersey was probably best known for providing the subject and title of a long poem by William Carlos Williams that aimed to do for the locale what Ulysses did for Dublin. From now on, it will also be remembered for inspiring one of Jim Jarmusch's very best films.
Get this. (Adam) Driver plays a (bus) driver called Paterson from Paterson (New Jersey). The first gag is surely accidental and gives no sense of the placid comic repetition that eases this film towards low-key greatness.
Paterson (the man) is also a poet. Before starting the bus he writes a few lines – inscribed on the screen in handwriting – and then continues to compose as he goes through the daily rituals. Home life is quiet and held to equally rigorous patterns. Paterson walks Marvin, his English bulldog, to an old-school brown bar and, after just the one beer, returns home to his kind, benignly obsessive wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). She decorates everything in black and white and develops schemes to become a professional baker or a country-and-western singer. (If the film has one flaw, it concerns the relegation of the main female character to domestic status.) She urges him to photocopy the poems that currently exist only in a notebook. He promises in a tone that assures us this will never happen.
There are endless sources of fascination in this deceptively rich movie. Frederick Elmes's camera makes the same observations that Dr Williams – of whom Paterson is an admirer – made in his watchful verse. It sees three sets of twins in three different places and says nothing more about it. It finds the protagonist forever straightening a leaning mailbox much as Jimmy Stewart kept dislodging that banister knob in It's a Wonderful Life. A photograph tells us that Paterson was once a soldier. In a rare outburst of action, we learn that he knows how to handle a man with a gun. But there are no further hints of trauma or instability.
Indeed, the great wonder of Paterson is that it makes a compelling tale of an apparently blissful life. "It's like living in the 20th Century," Laura says after they attend a (what else?) black-and-white movie. Well, yes. But only those rare corners of the century that were in perfect balance.
A sad appendix. Molly, the lady bulldog who plays Marvin, is surely the odds-on favourite to take the Palme Dog, awarded to best canine performance at Cannes. Unfortunately, she died after filming and will have to receive the award posthumously. The film is dedicated to her. As is this review.
