Critics reviews

The poems, written by New York School poet Ron Padgett, appear on screen as they're read aloud in voiceover; they are ingenuous and winsome much like Jarmusch's films... PATERSON may be his most refreshing contradiction, a self-edit that puts not only his ethos into perspective, but also the whole concept of what it means to be an artist.

It's part of the beauty and power of Jarmusch's minimalism as he's developed it in Paterson that it seems bountiful rather than deprived, an embarrassment of everyday miracles that yields an exquisitely uncluttered film about commonplace clutter — the kind that accumulates during a mainly ordinary week in the life of a New Jersey bus driver who also writes poetry, and one in which the ordinary flow of time is given an uncommon degree of orchestration.

Paterson, for all its apparent slightness, serves as a lovely portrait of the inspiration that artists take from daily life, insisting that creativity lies within all of us and that its raw materials lie all around us. It's as sweetly optimistic a movie as anyone's made in ages. Perfect timing.

Driver does what an actor can do in the movies, aided by a director who has the patience to watch him, who has the faith that the wait will yield something worth seeing and the knowledge of how to use the camera to bring us close to the actor without violating the air of emotional privacy that he has cultivated. Driver marries the surface stoicism of the classic male hero with the rich inner life of a man of deep feeling. And that's why we feel so close to him.

Herein lies the brilliance of Paterson as an elevated exploration of duality. Life can be one thing, or it can be another, malleable and volatile like crashing waterfalls, or simply sublime like water falling on hair. To paraphrase some of Paterson's own poems, your legs can be running out the door while your top half sits writing upstairs, each stubbornly ready for the next verse.

The film boasts one sight gag worthy of the genius of Hal Roach, and in a y when our "inner cities" are routinely dismissed as "hellholes," it imagines the possibility of urban life in terms recalling words that Randolph Bourne wrote over a century ago: a place fostering "the realization of the individual through the beloved community."

A lesser film would find life in Paterson, New Jersey a stifling slog, a prison of creative fulfillment. Instead, Jarmusch takes to heart the words of another poet, William Blake, once referenced in Dead Man: "Every night and every morn, some to misery are born. Every morn and every night, some are born to sweet delight." Every morn and every night, Paterson is content, with the gift of being able to "see a world in grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.

Jim Jarmusch has an uncanny ability to create a world in which all the physical attributes are recognizably "real" even as the rhythm of that world is slightly skewed. And skewed just right. Casting Adam Driver seals the deal.

The power of "Paterson" is in its seemingly long-brewing and deeply felt outburst of personal mythology; its world-building comes off as a credo, a belatedly laid and lifeworn cornerstone of Jarmusch's work, a quietly ecstatic vision of workaday perseverance and inspiration. It's ingenious, rousing, passionate—and yet constrained by the iron force of its own sense of virtue.

Jarmusch implants routine into PATERSON's DNA. Each day follows an almost identical shape, with repeated images. An atmospheric score, by Carter Logan, also is circular. The film has a tone and form close to the poetic style it champions—intimate camerawork, posed above figures, patiently watching. There's a minimalist elegance to the framing, such as the repeated shot of the chair in Paterson's bedroom, on which his clothes for the day sit waiting to be worn.

It feels like an attempt, and a very successful one, to approximate Williams's, or Padgett's, poetry in film form. It's a remarkably beautiful, satisfying work: it's crisply, precisely shot by Frederick Elmes, its images making the most of the ordinary places and faces of a city that may not in reality be as interesting or quietly charming as it seems here.

There's a sense of interdependent gears at work here. The man, the bus, the passengers, the bar patrons, all pouring into the poetry. But if the movie were merely an exercise in Jarmusch's fancy, it would be a pleasurable thing. It is a meticulously composed movie, shot beautifully by Frederick Elmes; every frame is a beauty. "Paterson" is ultimately more than a whim. It is a movie that actually grows more enigmatic on a second viewing.