Paterson

— Sometimes I instinctively know to hold off on seeing something because it’s going to want to access parts of my head used too long ago. Maybe that’s why I held off on seeing “Paterson” for a couple of years. Maybe I knew a film about creativity and art, about moving from images and sensations to words, wasn’t going to be easy. Adam Driver’s Paterson lives in Paterson, NJ, a city bus driver by day and a 24-hour poet, evidently inspired by his muse/partner Laura. As each day of the week begins, Paterson rises, leaving Laura in bed, and heads to work. As the days progress, his words are written across the screen, read with quiet precision as he writes them in his notebook, striving to elevate the everyday to art. He communicates the color in the world using black-and-white words while Laura spends her days embellishing everything, from curtains to cupcakes, with black-and-white pattern. Each evening he takes their dog and his nemesis, Marvin, for a walk, stopping at a bar to chat with the bartender. Home, sleep, repeat. It’s a slow pace and Driver goes through it with the perfect cadence. It is, of course, a nod to William Carlos Williams, a luminary in the Imagist movement and an inspiration for the Beat Generation, who left most of my generation thinking differently about red wheelbarrows and plums. The pace is almost agonizingly slow, but Paterson’s creative spirit needs a steady rhythm, not a fast one. Somehow, a week where one day seems nearly identical to the next ends up conveying the extraordinary calm and beauty of an everyday life, and it ends up being a fairly extraordinary film, imparting a feeling more than a storyline. [DVD]

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[2016. 118 min. Directed by Jim Marmusch. Starring Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani.]
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/paterson-2016