SFF NOTES: Paterson (2016, Dir. Jim Jarmusch)

I can watch Adam Driver’s face for days. I can listen to his voice like rumbling honey. I can effortlessly relax into his vibe.

It appears Jim Jarmusch has a similar jam. His latest film, named simply Paterson, is wrapped around Driver. It leans up against him and nuzzles into that area where his neck meets his shoulder and it listens to him purr while imagining his face staring, big featured and quizzical, into the distance, contemplating, this time around, poetry.

Driver is a bus driver, named Paterson, who works in Paterson, NJ. He gets up just after 6am every morning. He says goodbye to his artist/cupcake-cooking girlfriend. He walks to work. He drives his bus. He sits by a waterfall writing poetry. He drives his bus some more. He walks home. He walks his bulldog. He drinks at his local. And he does it all over again.

Jarmusch goes for a laid back poetry, scripted out onscreen with text and with imagery. The film is enigmatic, as most poems are, and heavily indebted to poetic rhythms, I’m guessing those aligned to the work of William Carlos Williams, who is frequently name-checked and who wrote an epic poem in the 1940s and 1950s titled, you guessed it, ‘Paterson’. Personally, I didn’t’ take to much of the poetry being composed by Paterson in his travels (American poet Ron Padgett provides the actual works); I’m guessing they require a little more musing time than even Jarmusch’s slowly metered film allows.

For Jarmusch’s part, the clumsy, self-conscious tone he’s imparted to all the performances sometimes hits sometimes doesn’t. The domesticity invoked between Driver and Golshifteh Farahani, who plays his girlfriend, is quaint (especially as their moody pooch is forever looking on and grunting under his breath) but also desperately dispassionate. A lot of Paterson’s interactions on the street and in the bar also have a slightly shuffling, shoe-gazing quality, which heightens the unreality at the same time as pulling focus onto life’s inconsequential details. Again, it works until it doesn’t.

If you can align to its rhythms, Paterson is a film that I’m sure rewards. It is a relaxing piece filled with off-handed beauty. But it just may be trying a little too hard to be that, if that makes sense.

★★★☆

Paterson screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.