[246 points / 23 votes]
“Jim Jarmusch’s sublime Paterson is a movie in which every unobtrusive, offhand moment seems to matter. I’ve always run hot and cold on this director’s brand of deadpan observation—Stranger Than Paradise, Night On Earth and Dead Man are better than fine, but I find movies like Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes close to insufferable, the nadir being The Limits of Control, in which the director precisely locates the dead zone of his title and practically disappears in a black hole of Eurotrash cool. But Jarmusch’s next movie was an astounding rebound, the dazzling, achingly muted Only Lovers Left Alive, and the analog-only sensibility of the vampires in that film feels strangely of a piece with this new work. Paterson looks an awful lot like a masterpiece to these eyes.
“Among the general choruses of praise for this film, I have heard dissent, objections to what has been perceived as shallow celebration of an unremarkable milieu as processed through the usual detached urban romanticism that has been Jarmusch’s bread and butter. But in much the same way the director managed to worm his way inside the sympathies of centuries-old bloodsuckers who couldn’t help but absorb the effects of a developing culture over (lots and lots of) time, Paterson reveals itself as not so much a hipster’s evocation of a working-class hero as it is one imbued with an acuity which illuminates, with a precision that’s never precious, the modest and poetic pursuits of its title character, played by Adam Driver, a Paterson, N.J. bus driver also happens to be named Paterson. (First name or last is our guess.) In Paterson Jarmusch manages to evoke an ostensibly familiar setting that’s attentive but also respectful instead of just acting as fodder for arch observations about the numbness of the lower middle class. This is one of the only movies I can think of in which the routine of the everyday isn’t portrayed as soul-killing drudgery but instead as a source of inspiration. (Paterson toils on a poem throughout the film, the words of which are written in the air in halting rhythms that duplicate his struggle to evoke imagery and the sound of words working together.) And all of this without feeling the necessity to draping its protagonist in a cloak of everyday sainthood along the way.
“Taking its cue from Paterson himself, the movie’s persona is almost preternaturally serene, ushering us to an understanding of the way he sees the world and intensifying those occasional moments which are suddenly anything but tranquil or untroubled. Paterson, and Paterson, is almost subconsciously intuitive in regard to the ephemeral connections that seem to reverberate through the air largely unprocessed-- there are instances when the viewer’s Spidey-sense tingles with moments that in other hands would connect all too clearly. But in Jarmusch’s that tingling is left to resonate, to form independent angles and attitudes inside the viewer’s head. The movie has an offhanded fixation on twins—Paterson and Paterson, N.J., Paterson and Paterson, the William Carlos Williams poem that seeds the bus driver’s soul. And early on, on his nightly walk to the neighborhood bar accompanied by stubbornly lovable bulldog (a hilarious performance by Nellie, as Marvin, who Jarmusch rewards with a great payoff joke involving the bus driver’s mailbox), Paterson encounters twin brothers named Sam and Dave, who themselves add little to the movie beyond another thread in its observational tapestry, but whose presence sensitizes us to the curious longing in Paterson that is beginning to develop. There can be no doubt that Paterson unfailingly loves and supports his wife (Golshifteh Farahani), an effervescent dabbler in homespun creativity who designs their modest home with her painterly whims and fills the air with bake-sale cookies and dreams of being a country-music star. But he has an unarticulated hope for a connection with someone else in his bustling, preoccupied workday who is sympathetic with his way of processing the world, and it is on this plane that Jarmusch’s twinning motif pays of in an ephemerally lovely way.
“The Italian poster for Paterson features the catchphrase ‘La bellezza spesso si trova nelle piccolle cose,’ which translates to ‘Beauty is often found in the little things,’ an exquisite distillation of Paterson’s, and Paterson’s beating heart. Jim Jarmusch’s unassumingly gorgeous and expansive movie locates that beauty. It’s the story of a man who searches for, and eventually finds, a measure of fulfillment in work, and in love, and simply by keeping his eyes and ears and soul open to the quotidian wonders of being alive.” ~ Dennis Cozzalio
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