Movie Review: 'Paterson'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Adam Driver plays a bus driver named Paterson in Paterson, New Jersey.
This set of playful double-deckers comprise the spine of – what else? – Paterson, a quiet, characteristically eccentric drama from writer-director Jim Jarmusch.
As usual, Jarmusch (Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth, Dead Man, Broken Flowers), whose films are invariably meditative and deliberate, is interested in exploring different aspects of his material than most mainstream movies concentrate on.
Paterson is a week-in-the-life drama, one day at a time, about a city bus driver who writes poetry as an avocation.
His wife, played by Iranian-American actress Golshifteh Farahani, wishes he would find a way to get his poetry published – or at least make copies.
But he just hangs on to the originals, keeps writing them in his trusty notebook, and lets it go at that.
Jarmusch's interest here is in the ordered everyday life that this character lives and the satisfaction he gets from domestic harmony.
Not exactly an action-thriller sequel, is it?
As filmmakers go, Jarmusch is a poet working in a medium devoted to prose.
Here he celebrates the mundane without conceding a thing to the dictates of drama: Paterson wakes up each morning, heads for work, writes a new poem as he moves through his day, overhears passengers' conversations, comes home from work, walks the dog, has a beer, sits down to dinner.
A secret agent he's not.
Never one to emphasize life's big moments, Jarmusch concentrates on the banalities. But he overplays – or is it underplays? -- his hand, as if assuming that the absence of conflict will not be noticed and that the strong similarity of each day to the last day and the next day can't ever run out of steam.
Well, it can. And it does.
And the languid pacing doesn't help.
As a prominent mover-and-shaker on the independent-cinema scene, Jarmusch remains an acquired taste, and moviegoers craving action or sensationalism are hereby forewarned.
After all, the unremarkable cannot always be turned into the remarkable, even by a gifted filmmaker. Tension may not be good for real life, but it's fine if not crucial for reel life.
It is interesting to see how protagonist Paterson gets his creative inspiration from daily occurrences. But that only goes so far in a feature film. Something has to justify the feature-length running time.
And although there's a measure of very dry wit sprinkled about, it's in very short supply.
In Adam Driver, Jarmusch has a lead actor who has made his mark of late (on TV's "Girls" and in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Silence) and does what he can with the role, providing an appropriate and persuasively lived-in performance.
But with Jarmusch so adamantly ignoring what is popular or exciting or engaging or expected or desired, Driver is left with little to work with other than a steering wheel and a notebook. And that's just not enough.
When a movie is repetitive on purpose, it's still repetitive.
Now no one's saying that Paterson should be apprehending criminals or robbing liquor stores or tap dancing through the bus terminal.
But the absence of narrative momentum eventually undermines the film's aesthetic qualities and saps its strengths while it tries our patience.
So we'll drive 2 stars out of 4. As movie vehicles go, Paterson is anything but an express bus.
