Paterson and the poetry of the ordinary day

By the usual measures of cinema, almost nothing happens in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. The hero is called Paterson and so is his town: in Paterson, New Jersey, a bus driver writes poems in a notebook between shifts. The film follows a week of this man’s life. What surprises is that so little incident produces not boredom but a calm, generous experience. My thesis here is that Paterson uses repetition not as a shortcoming but as a rule of poetry: as rhythm.

The ending involves the notebook, so consider this a spoiler notice.

The verses of a week

The film covers a single week and, as Jonathan Romney notes in Film Comment, each day follows a similar pattern. Paterson wakes beside Laura, forms lines in his head as he walks to work, overhears passengers while driving, comes home, walks their bulldog Marvin and stops at a bar for a beer. Romney likens the structure to the stanzas of a poem. The comparison seems right to me, because stanzas repeat a pattern and meaning arises from the small differences inside it.

The film’s dramaturgy rests entirely on those small differences. A bus breakdown, a disturbing night at the bar, a late disruption near the end of the week: Romney observes that such variations are small and rarely lead anywhere, and that the world absorbs even shocks back into its calm. Where cinema habitually asks “what will happen?”, Paterson asks something else: “what will make this day different from the last?” That question is what turns viewers towards their own ordinary days.

What Jarmusch does is let the rhythm of repetition be felt through editing and framing. The same morning routine, the same route, the same evening walk, each time in a slightly different light and with a different scrap of overheard talk. Instead of saying something within one long scene, the film speaks through accumulation across repetitions, which is how poetic forms built on refrain and slight variation also work.

Doubles, twins and poems

Another detail Romney points out is the twins who keep crossing Paterson’s days: pairs of elderly women, men in plaid shirts, young girls. The film does not explain them. In Romney’s reading they belong to a wider pattern of doubling: the hero shares a name with the city, and the ordinary world is set beside its reflection in poetry. What rhyme is to a poem, the twin is here: two parts resembling each other make apparently meaningless things feel ordered.

The poems are by Ron Padgett. According to Wikipedia, the film uses four of his existing poems and three written for it; “Water Falls,” attributed to a young girl, was written by Jarmusch himself. Romney describes Paterson’s poems as short verses about ordinary things, heard in voiceover or seen on screen, which makes concrete the idea that the ordinary can be the material of poetry. He also notes that they draw on William Carlos Williams, whose own poem Paterson returns at a key moment near the end.

David Edelstein of New York Magazine points to a danger: by avoiding the city’s poverty, the film’s unreality comes close to seeming twee, though he adds that the poems make the difference. I agree. The film’s gentle world is a choice, but the choice is only worth as much as what is said inside it. Without the poems it would be a tidy miniature.

The notebook, the dog and a quiet defiance

On Saturday night, after a trip to the cinema, Marvin shreds Paterson’s notebook. The film could have staged a drama here: years of accumulated poems are gone. Instead the expectation of drama meets a quiet scene. The next day Paterson sits by the Great Falls of the Passaic River, where a stranger reading Williams’s Paterson strikes up a conversation and gives him an empty notebook. The film ends with Paterson writing a poem in it. Eric Kohn of Indiewire found this finale brilliantly cryptic and tied it to Paterson’s personal setbacks.

To my mind, the ending confirms the film’s thesis. Loss is met not as catastrophe but as a new page. Poetry lives not in the notebook but in the attention that rebuilds the day every day. The notebook can be destroyed; the shape of the attention remains. It is the outcome most faithful to Jarmusch’s general temperament, his suppression of drama in favour of calm.

Quietism, limits and production

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter called the film mild-mannered and almost startlingly undramatic, a work that rewards longtime Jarmusch fans. That can be read as praise or as a warning: Paterson leaves outside anyone who will not join its rhythm. Romney finds Laura the film’s least convincing character; with her black-and-white style, he argues, her restless creativity is more a force than a person, set up as the counterpart to Paterson’s quiet reflection. Laura’s dream of a cupcake business, and the thought that the couple’s happiness may be more fragile than the film admits, continue that reading.

The production details support the film’s approach. It was shot over 30 days in the fall of 2015, in Paterson and at various locations in New York. Adam Driver obtained a commercial bus driver’s licence for the role, and Golshifteh Farahani plays Laura. The film premiered at Cannes on 16 May 2016, in competition for the Palme d’Or, and Nellie, the dog from the film, was awarded the Palm Dog posthumously. With 96 per cent approval on Rotten Tomatoes from 256 reviews and a Metacritic score of 90 out of 100, the film, at 118 minutes, showed that a very plain idea of cinema can also find critical favour.

The seriousness of the ordinary

The charm of Paterson lies in not exalting the ordinary. The film does not turn a plain day into a miracle; it simply pays attention, and proposes that attention is itself a kind of poem. The life of a bus driver-poet is neither a grand story of redemption nor a tale of sacrifice. It says that one can take a job seriously, take a town seriously and take a small piece of writing seriously.

Of course this outlook has limits. As Romney reminds us, the world’s easy absorption of shocks makes the film protective in places, and Edelstein’s warning about sweetness is not idle. But that limit is the price of the film’s consistency. Paterson offers not a fast story but a slow way of looking, and it stays honest within its own proposal. As one of the few films that teach noticing inside repetition, it lets us hear the rhythm of a life inside the span of a week.