Portland observer., January 25, 2017, Page Page 9, Image 9

January 25, 2017
Page 9
Mississippi
Alberta
North Portland
Vancouver
East County
Beaverton
photo courteSy a MaZon
S tudioS and b leecker S treet
Adam Driver stars in ‘Paterson,’ a new film that gives a gentle examination of the ordinary life of a poet-laborer and his wife.
Film Depicts the Mysticism of Ordinary Life
There is something so necessary about
Jim Jarmusch’s new film, “Paterson.” In
giving us this gentle examination of the life
of a poet-laborer and his wife, Jarmusch
has demonstrated something that we are al-
ways in danger of missing: the mysticism
of ordinary life.
The story is set in Paterson, New Jersey,
which happens to have been the home of
the poet William Carlos Williams, whose
poetic imagination was an inspiration for
the film. Williams was a physician who
famously described his approach to poetry
as involving “no ideas but in things,” a line
from his epic poem, “Paterson.” Much has
been written about what Williams meant by
this; what is embodied in Jarmusch’s film
is a lovely reverence for focusing one’s
life around the concrete and the particular.
Here, the poet-laborer is our teacher.
As beautifully played by Adam Driver,
he is a bus driver named Paterson who lives
in Paterson. The resonance of that descrip-
tion is typical of the film; Jarmusch is in-
tuitively attentive to synchronicities, those
threads that run through ordinary life and
o PinionAted
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by
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which contain a sort of gentle guidance. Yet
Jarmusch does not cling to those threads or
tie them into a bow; like a good mystic, he
savors them briefly and lets them go. The
film is constructed around the rhythms that
are evident in seven days of Paterson’s life,
a structure reminiscent of the cantos of a
long poem. Listen for the beats.
Paterson wakes each morning to an
inner alarm. He picks up his watch from
the night table, notices the time (between
6:15 and 6:30), gently kisses his sleeping
wife, who may murmur something about
the content of her dreams. He rises, eats
his bowl of Cheerios, surrounded by little
signs of his wife’s artistic energies – cur-
tains and cushions and accents dominated
by black and white circles and fluid lines.
He walks to the bus depot in the quiet of
the morning, writes a few lines of poetry in
his notebook, listens to the daily woes of a
coworker, and begins a day of driving the
streets of Paterson from the wide perch of
the front of his bus.
Paterson’s days hum with intention. He
resists using an alarm or a smart phone,
keeping his body tuned to an exterior
rhythm. He is always listening, and not
only with his ears, attentive to the sound
of his wife’s breathing, to the rush of the
falls that he walks past each day, to the
poetry of conversations among his passen-
gers and the denizens of the bar where he
drinks a beer each evening. Walking down
the street, he is alert enough to notice the
sounds of a rapper working out a beat, or a
child writing in a notebook.
Paterson lives with Laura, a lovely
woman played by Iranian actress Gol-
shifteh Farahani. Perhaps they are mar-
ried, perhaps not, but they are intimate-
ly connected in a way that is essential
to both of them. I’ve noticed that critics
commonly miss Laura’s importance to
this story, which strikes me as telling. In
her way, she also makes beauty from the
ordinary; she is a homemaker in the best
sense, not something we are accustomed
to valuing. Where Paterson is still, listen-
ing, Laura is playful. She paints, makes
cupcakes, decorates their small home, and
fills their world with beauty and whimsy.
Paterson observes to a friend that Laura
really understands him, and it is evident
that he understands her too. The love be-
tween them feels deep and yet spacious,
the kind that one expects to stand the test
of time. Each notices and appreciates the
c ontinued on p age 16