Jim Jarmuschis a director who is most in his comfort zone when not much is happening. Those who crave more mainstream commercial narratives might find themselves bored or at a distance from this director’s films, which are never anything less than thoughtful, often deliberately slow-paced, and rife with esoteric cultural references. Few filmmakers are as gifted at mining the beauty and poetry from everyday life as Jarmusch.
Jarmusch’s 2016 masterpiecePatersonis, among other things, a film about a poet. The poet in question’s name is Paterson. Paterson lives in Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson, played in a soulfully understated performance byAdam Driver, is a bus driver who scribbles into a journal in his spare time (Ron Padgett, renowned poet of the New York School, is responsible for penning the gorgeous verse we hear Driver recite in the film).
For Paterson, every day is more or less the same. He wakes up next to his lovely wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), herself an artist. He goes to work, where the conversations he hears on his commute around the city find their way into his writing. He goes home. He takes his grouchy bulldog Marvin for a walk. He stops by a watering hole called Shades. He makes small talk with the locals: a recognizably Jarmuschian gallery of low-key oddballs that includesThe Good PlaceandMidsommarstandoutWilliam Jackson Harperand also character actor par excellenceBarry Shabaka Henley. Finally, Paterson heads home.
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Another filmmaker might interpret the repetition of Paterson’s day-to-day as a kind of soul-killing existential stasis. What Jarmusch allows us to see in his depiction is the peace one can find in a sense of routine. Jarmusch rightly believes that there is nothing at all amiss with Paterson’s peaceful, ordinary, “unambitious” existence. The man’s daily procedure provides him with a sort of spiritual center, not to mention the fact that the movie’s hypnotic and stylistically deliberate depiction of said routine affords the screenplay whatever structure it has (Jarmusch’s films are many things, but they are rarely busy).
Then again, there is an event that occurs near the end ofPatersonthat throws our hero’s world into a tailspin. Throughout the movie, we see Driver’s character writing studiously in his journal. The journal itself is a seemingly unimportant object that actually holds a deep meaning for Paterson. After all, the man isn’t just making note of the inane details of his workday: he’s using his downtime to actually create something meaningful.
One day, Paterson and Laura return home from a movie date to find that Marvin the bulldog has completely destroyed Paterson’s book of poems. There is absolutely zero chance that the damage can be repaired. For context: Laura has been imploring her husband to make physical copies of his work, since Paterson, a true analog head, doesn’t appear to be a “laptop” type of dude. In the end, Paterson’s stubborn devotion to supposed artistic purity unwittingly leads to a fairly major loss.
At this moment, there is nothing Paterson can say or do to improve his situation. He remains silent, devastated, knowing that all the hard work he poured into that journal now lies in literal tatters on the floor. Silence is a pronounced motif here – not just in this scene and throughout the rest ofPaterson, but throughout Jarmusch’s larger filmography. Part of the reason that less patient viewers often tune out of Jarmusch’s films (at their loss) is that, as a filmmaker, the white-haired Akron native has never been afraid of languishing on what some might think to call dead space. For instance: a typical Jarmusch shot will find two or more characters occupying an often-static frame. Many times, the characters are still, rarely are they in any hurry. Jarmusch knows that there is a such thing asover-writing: he understands the value of silence, and its immense power as a storytelling tool.
Patersonis filled with passages of transfixing silence, though Jarmusch also shrewdly renders much of his lead character’s world as a kind of immersive diegetic spectacle. We are so thoroughly entrenched in Paterson’s state of mind, even in the film’s earliest scenes, that a dialogue dump would not only feel unnecessary but intrusive. There is real integrity in Jarmusch’s willingness to linger on these silent moments: not only is the writer/director placing a huge degree of trust in his actors to communicate deep feelings without the use of language, he is also placing trust in his audience that we’ll be able to keep up.
Naturally, there are more than a few inimitable Jarmusch chatterboxes scattered throughout the course of his filmography:Roberto Benigni’s motor-mouthed Italian wild man inDown By Law,Elizabeth Bracco’svoluble Memphis-bound tourist inMystery Train,Giancarlo Esposito’s wonderfully named New York loudmouth YoYo inNight On Earth, to name but a few. For the most part, though, Jarmusch’s lot are a stoic bunch. Think of the Japanese rockabilly lovebirds ofMystery Train,Forest Whitaker’s rooftop assassin inGhost Dog: Way Of The Samurai, or the doddering hepcat pool sharks who populated the director’s indie breakthrough,Stranger Than Paradise. The centuries-old rock-star vampires ofOnly Lovers Left Alivereally don’t need to say much of anything to each other – when you’ve been in love with someone for that long, you learn to appreciate the moments of shared quietude.
There is a degree to which the silence and stoicism of Driver’s character inPatersoncould be mistaken for passivity. Make no mistake, though, the Paterson ofPatersonis always observing, his mind and heart always open and attuned to the frequencies of the world around him. You see this quiet dynamic at play in scenes like the one where he unassumingly makes the acquaintance of an amateur MC he meets folding laundry (amusingly, Jarmusch, a longtime pal of theWu-Tang Clan, cast the legendary rapperMethod Manin this small but memorable part). Hip-hop is sometimes ignorantly decried as a vulgar art form, but Paterson doesn’t hear chest-beating braggadocio when he listens to this guy folding his clothes: he hears wordplay, storytelling, linguistic invention, and a genuine authorial voice at play. The exchange between the two is all the more affecting for how economically the scene is written – and, once again, for the silent insinuations that go unsaid.
Paterson losing his book of poems near the end of the film imbues this otherwise shaggy story with a shot of genuine heartache, a feeling that something’s been lost that can never be fully regained. Yet, Jarmusch suggests there is indeed hope. In the movie’s final scene, an understandably crushed Paterson sits by himself near the Great Falls of the Passaic River, where he occasionally goes to clear his mind after a long day. There, he meets a stranger, played byMystery Train’sMasatoshi Nagase. The two end up engaged in a lovely conversation about poetry, specifically,William Carlos Williams’epic poem, “Paterson.” The scene concludes with a genuine act of generosity from this kind stranger, once again affirming Jarmusch’s belief in the charity doled out by those you meet along life’s back-alley paths. The book, while inarguably only a material item, contained some piece of its author’s soul. The stranger implores Paterson, in the wake of what he’s lost, to keep writing, and by proxy, to keepliving.
By the standards of the famously cool Jarmusch, the scene almost qualifies as sentimental, even if it doesn’t stoop to the level of being corny. Another read suggests that the iconic filmmaker, who has occasionally been accused of posturing by some of his less charitable critics, is being as nakedly vulnerable here as he’s ever allowed himself to be. There is unruffled magic folded into the sleepy narrative layers ofPaterson, as well as hard-earned wisdom about the joy to be had in the mere act of creating, regardless ofwhosees your work. How does one do this? It starts with listening to the silence.
