Paterson

Adam Driver is the star of Jim Jarmusch’s new film-poem, playing bus driver Paterson in the city of Paterson, New Jersey; a performance far from Kylo Ren, and Lena Dunham’s hermit love interest in HBO’s Girls, he is subdued and goodhearted in his day-to-day travails. A worthy poet and a worthy bus driver. He plugs into the tradition of male poets with dull day jobs: Bukowski in the post office, Philip Larkin in the library. Creativity in the face of routine. In between his weekday monotony he pens verse in a notebook and reads his favourite Paterson-born poet William Carlos Williams. Every morning he wakes and kisses his girlfriend Laura, eats his Cheerios. Every evening he takes their dog Marvin for a walk and stops at the bar for a beer. Driver has a good face for expressing deep thought. During the film we meet other poets, including a rapper in a laundrette and a schoolgirl writing similes with a waterfall. Golshifteh Farahani’s Laura is obsessed with wearing and painting black and white: cupcakes, guitars, shower curtains.

Finding an absolute meaning in a Jim Jarmusch film is like joining up stars to form constellations – are they just the patterns we want to see? They certainly connect, and you can feel good about the shapes, but are they the right shapes? Perhaps that’s good enough. Characters are paired up, literally as twins (seriously, the amount of twins in this town…) or as Shakespearean lovers, or just visually in the opening bed scenes. Is Paterson the person paired with Paterson the place? In a way Paterson is Paterson, the poet is treading the footsteps of its literary inhabitants (Ginsberg was also a resident). The Driver/driver coupling might not be such a coincidence.

Jarmusch does speech and conversation brilliantly, and each three minute bus-talk is like a vignette from his earlier film Coffee and Cigarettes. His appetite for weird references remains: an Iggy Pop news clipping (his Stooges doc is forthcoming) and the child actors from Moonrise Kingdom are briefly shown discussing anarchism on Paterson’s bus! All grown up! The film is calm and classically Jim as it floats along at its own pace, weaving between characters and building a dialogue between Paterson and the city. Not as creatively exciting as something like Ghost Dog or Dead Man, but still worth your time.