By Jake Wilson
★★½
Jim Jarmusch has never shied away from whimsy, and the coy games in his new film Paterson start with the title – which refers to the city in New Jersey where the action takes place, but also to the hero played by Adam Driver, an unpublished but dedicated poet who makes his living driving a bus.
Built on musical repetitions rather than plot, the film charts an ordinary week in Paterson's life. Each morning, he says goodbye to his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and heads to the bus depot. At the wheel, he lets his thoughts drift, listening in on the conversations of his passengers and mulling over works in progress (free-verse jottings composed in reality by the widely published poet Ron Padgett). In the evening, he returns home to Laura then takes their British bulldog for a walk, stopping off at his local for a drink and a chat with the other regulars.
If all this sounds a bit precious, you're on the right track. Jarmusch is justly revered as one of the fathers of modern independent American film, but his films have grown ever more wispy and self-congratulatory, and Paterson, though artful in its way, is the most cloying of the lot. Whatever the real Paterson may be like, the fanciful city portrayed here suggests a shabbier, more racially diverse version of Woody Allen's imaginary Manhattan: a bohemian fairyland of farmer's markets and chess tournaments, where a cinema shows old horror films on Saturday nights, a little girl cites Emily Dickinson and a teenage couple – played by the leads from Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom – proves improbably well-versed in local history.
Actor Adam Driver's natural urgency adds to the unease beneath the surface of the movie Paterson.
Paradoxically, this indifference to realism co-exists with an emphasis on the beauty of the everyday: reflections in a windscreen, the texture of brickwork. Living out a yearning for the authentic, Driver's character is an old soul who prefers pen and paper to a laptop and refuses to carry a mobile phone. Of course, the lure of authenticity is itself a classic marketing ploy – a paradox that Jarmusch avoids examining too deeply, though Paterson's ode to a favourite brand of matches could well be repurposed as high-end advertising copy.
The idealised vision of Paterson's marriage likewise has something in common with advertising, in that we're not encouraged to give the fantasy too much thought. Laura is an artist in her own domestic sphere, but also a bit of an airhead, fantasising about a music career and baking a revolting pie which Paterson manfully chews through (a scenario straight from I Love Lucy). She worships him, he humours her: that's the relationship. Will the cracks in the idyll start to show, as they do for a comparable couple in Miranda July's corrosive The Future? Maybe, but not this week.
To his credit, Jarmusch makes no bones about asking us to suspend disbelief. His magic-realist touches – like the way Paterson keeps noticing pairs of twins – suggest how the world might look to an observer uncommonly attuned to patterns, but also highlight the artificiality of a film conceived as a closed system where every element refers to another. Paterson is twinned with his city, and also with Laura: she's obsessed with painting circles, which echo the Cheerios her husband eats for breakfast, the wheels of his bus, and the soothing form of a film which moves through a series of cycles and ends where it begins.
Yet through all the lulling repetitions, a degree of unease persists. Driver remains a naturally urgent actor, even when playing a character who avoids making waves. Tall and lean, with a long worried face, he threads his way through the city's rundown streets as if navigating a similar maze in his mind, composed of self-imposed rules about what should and shouldn't be said.
Strikingly, one of the first things we learn about Paterson is that he served in the military, implying a latent capacity for violence which he shares with other Jarmusch heroes, and which can be taken to underwrite the security of the calm world we see. Perhaps he's capable of darker thoughts than those which surface in his poems. Certainly, there are moments when his intent, restless gaze suggests not just curiosity but paranoia – leaving us to wonder what he, or Jarmusch, might have to fear.