Paterson

Paterson is the rarest of all thing -- a film about a poet that is actually poetic.  Exceedingly sweet and gentle, Jim Jarmusch's movie is a kind a lyric poem itself. 

Lyric poetry is not generally narrative -- a lyric poems presents us with an emotionally inflected situation or encounter, not a story.  Similarly, Paterson is without much in the way of a conventional plot -- the film simply chronicles one week in the life of its hero, a bus driver born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey who is, himself, named Paterson.  The bus-man is married to an extraordinarily beautiful, if eccentric woman who seems to be Iranian -- she mentions a dream that takes place in Persia.  The bus-man is an artist -- he writes short unassuming poems in his spare-time and has a small office in the basement of his tiny home where he labors on his literary work.  (He writes in longhand in "a secret notebook" and one of the aspects of the movie offputting to Millenials is that the hero doesn't have a computer or, even, a cell-phone -- this makes him completely implausible to young people and too weird to be sympathetic.  My son's first comment about the movie was:  "They don't seem to know about social media.")  The third member of the bus driver's household, and just as important as the husband and wife, is a fat, rather malevolent English bulldog -- the beast is cute, but turns out to be supremely malicious and the hero's obvious distrust of the dog is more than warranted. 

Jarmusch is a film poet and he grasps that a movie without a plot needs, nonetheless, to be rigorously structured.  The structure is supervisory -- it keeps the film from slipping into shapelessness.   Accordingly, the movie is divided into seven approximately equal episodes, one for each day.  Each day begins with an overhead shot of the hero in bed with his wife.  The hero's discipline is also impressive:  without an alarm clock, he always wakes around 6:15 am, checks his watch, nuzzles his slumbering wife, and, then, eats a bowl of Cheerios.  (The round cereal rhymes with black circles  with which his wife decorates their home as well as with the cupcakes that she makes, also frosted with white and black circular forms.  The black and white, similarly, rhymes with an old black and white movie that the couple watch at a nearby theater -- it's The Island of Lost Souls, an adaptation of H. G. Wells Island of Dr. Moreau.  The panther woman in the thirties horror film has lustrous black hair and looks very much like the poet's wife, a resemblance on which he remarks.  It is on the basis of these visual rhymes or correspondences that the film progresses and they are probably innumerable -- on first viewing, my guess is that I noticed only the most obvious of them.  Another example must suffice:  the hero's wife dreams of twins and tells the poet about this dream:  throughout the movie, the hero encounters many twins, perhaps five separate couples -- again a system of visual rhymes manifested in the "twin-ness" itself.)  Each morning, the busdriver walks to work through a Victorian industrial compound, encounters his boss, a morose Indian overwhelmed by a sea of troubles, and, then, drives his bus through the streets of Paterson -- he operates the #23 line and, apparently, is a very capable and accomplished bus driver.  Returning home, the hero sets upright his mailbox post that is always knocked awry (it turns out that the bulldog, whose malice is boundless, goes outside each noon and butts the mail box off-kilter), eats dinner with his wife and, then, takes the dog for a walk.  The walk always includes tethering the dog to the outside of meter at a tavern where the hero has one beer and interacts with people from the neighborhood -- there are a couple of very tentative subplots involving people at the bar but they are only minimally developed.  Every day is like every other day -- the hero hears fragments of conversations that interest him on the bus (a boy- and girl-anarchist discussing an Italian assassin from Paterson, some kids talking about Hurricane Carter, a couple of men discussing women).  The electrical system on his bus fails and he has to shepherd his fares onto a new bus -- three people mention that it's lucky the bus didn't explode into "a fireball."  Sometimes, the hero sits in the park and looks at the great waterfall plunging through its ragged, dark gorge among the ancient millworks.  It is this waterfall, of course, that is central to William Carlos Williams modernist epic, also named Paterson, and the viewer should know that Williams' book-length poem involves a sleeping giant similar to HCE in Finnegan's Wake who is also known as Paterson and who embodies the characteristics and history of the city.  Thus, the hero is related to both the city where he has been born and lives, Williams' poem, a continuous reference point throughout the film, and himself seems to embrace those qualities that are significant to the city.  (The city was also the home of Alan Ginsberg and Alexander Hamilton as well as Lou Costello -- these people and others are name-checked by the film).  Adam Driver, ubiquitous on the Silver Screen this season, plays the poet-bus driver and his muted, simple good will is intrinsic to the movie's appeal. 

William Carlos Williams famously said that there are "no ideas but in things."  (This dicta is quoted in the film).  The movie invites the viewer to look at the things shown and make his or her own short, lyric poems.  We find ourselves scrutinizing the imagery, much consisting of Ozu-like "empty frames" (that is, still lives), and wondering to what extent a sensibility like the hero, or like ourselves in the mood of poetic reverie could use those things to make a poem.  In effect, the movie generously enforces upon the viewer the duties of the poet.  The verse in the film is by the poet Ron Padgett -- to me, the little poems are mere bagatelles, mildly amusing on a sub-Billy Collins level.  This is to say that the poems actually displayed by the film didn't particularly impress me.  But this isn't the point.  The purpose of Jarmusch's exercise to embed the viewer within a poet's imagination -- although the verse may be "written on water" as the hero says (citing Keats' epitaph), the pleasure of inhabiting the hero's lyric sensibility is a profound one.

This is one of the best films of the year.