After the melancholy vampire story that was Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch has delivered an equally meditative human drama with Paterson. It’s a film that shows a week in the life of a lovely artistic couple living in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) is an avid painter, designer and cupcake maker, with a distinctive monochromatic colour scheme in everything she makes, and wears, though ironically she is a very colourful character. Her husband, Paterson (Adam Driver), is a gentle poet who drives a bus for a living, and uses all of his break time to write a few lines in his "secret notebook". While Laura sells her wares at the local farmers’ market, where they're very popular, Paterson won't share his work with anyone other than her. For ages, she's been telling them he should get his poems published, or at the very least make copies of them. Eventually he promises to photocopy them all on the weekend, on one of those last two days that the film shows.

This is hardly a movie that runs on suspense, mostly it's an episodic musing on the little things in life, but there are still a few little narrative arcs that are given a nice payoff. One of these is the question of whether he'll keep that promise in time. Unlike Laura, who shares a piece of her creativity everywhere she goes, Paterson is just happy to watch the world go by. Laura is the one with all the latest gadgets, while Paterson doesn't even have a mobile phone. He's content to just let it all come and go, just like his poems, and his passengers of course. As you’d expect, he hears all sorts of things when he’s eavesdropping at the wheel. People have some very amusing conversations when it looks like no one is listening. There’s plenty of shots of him smirking at them while looking at the road, but these snippets never really make their way into his poems. That would have been too predictable, and far too neat. He mostly writes about what he sees at home, or at the park where he eats his lunch every day. Adam Driver’s voiceover readings of these poems are pleasingly unpolished. Paterson doesn’t sound like he’s reciting them for an audience, he really does sound like he’s writing the words as they come to him.

Jarmusch only overstretches believability when it comes to the couple’s dog, Marvin. He’s certainly adorable, but Jarmusch can’t seem to decide if he wants him to be an anthropomorphised animal character, like Gromit, or a projection of whatever the human characters are going through. It might have been more effective to just let him be a dog, another part of Paterson’s world that he can silently take in.

Paterson is very much a quiet observer who’s surrounded by some very vocal characters. His boss, Donny (Rizwan Manji) is one of those people who likes to answer with complete honesty when someone asks him how he is. Paterson’s favourite bar is also frequented by an actor named Everett (William Jackson Harper) and his ex-girlfriend, Marie, (Chasten Harmon) who Everett can’t seem to let go of and to whom he won’t stop making melodramatic professions of his undying love.

While these figures encourage Paterson to come out of his shell a little and make his mark on the world, they’re never called upon to transform him. Jarmusch isn’t interested in showing how an introvert can turn into an extrovert. Instead, he shows how it’s possible for someone so quiet to navigate a world where it’s survival of the loudest and still remain true to themself.

Written by Christian Tsoutsouvas

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