If the triumph of Donald Trump has dented your faith in America, Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Paterson, might give you hope. The picture it paints of the USA is the antithesis of Trump’s: sensitivity and warm-hearted kindness against bullying petulance; diversity and tolerance against bigotry; integrity and honesty against swaggering untruths. If Trump is about building walls and closing minds, Paterson is about keeping them open.
But, you may ask, given that this is a book blog, not a film blog, what is a review of Paterson doing here? (apart from giving me the chance to vent some anti-Trump sentiments). There’s a simple answer: it’s a film about poetry. It’s about lots of other things too – love, marriage, the American urban landscape – but poetry is the film’s heart. It follows a week in the life of Paterson, a New Jersey bus driver (played, appropriately enough, by Adam Driver). In his spare moments, Paterson writes poetry – an unpublished diary of his feelings and ideas as he moves around the city, listening, observing, reflecting, and working his thoughts into words.
It’s not easy to make writing poetry visually exciting – you’re either watching someone write, or watching someone think. Consequently, many films about poets focus on the life rather than the work, favouring the more turbulent and tempestuous details: think Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig literally tearing chunks out of each other as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, or Daniel Radcliffe letting it all hang out as Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings.
Paterson isn’t like this at all. The central character’s life is quiet and uneventful – you might even call it dull. Every day follows the same pattern. He gets up, goes to work, has a short conversation with his gloomy boss, drives his bus, eats lunch in a park overlooking the magnificent falls of the Passaic River, drives his bus, walks home, eats supper, walks the dog, drinks one beer in a local bar, and returns home. At times, the relentless repetition reminds you of Groundhog Day’s cosmic looping. But instead of resisting the mundanity of daily life, as weatherman Phil Connor initially does, Paterson embraces his routine with a zen-like serenity. In fact, he seems to have designed it this way: his life is a carefully crafted structure – like the form which supports a poem – freeing him to think and write.
That Paterson is a poet is entirely apt, since the city where he works, and which shares his name, is famously the subject of a six-volume epic poem by the twentieth century American poet William Carlos Williams. Like Paterson, Williams was a poet with a day job, working as a doctor in a New Jersey medical practice, and typing his poems in the evenings, or during breaks between appointments. Williams believed that poetry shouldn’t focus too much on abstractions – there should be ‘no ideas but in things’ – and his best-known poem, ‘This is just to say’, illustrates his faith in the strength of simple statement:
Jarmusch seems to share Williams’s belief in the power of ‘things’ and the virtues of simplicity. The film draws its rhythm from Paterson’s poems, which we see unfurling across the screen as he composes them and hear as he speaks them to himself. We learn to look through his eyes, following his gaze as it wanders over the world, gently observing, studying the forms and colours, the faces and figures that populate the city. With him, we eavesdrop on conversations – macho males soothing their egos after a disastrous date, or children swapping sports stories. The film celebrates serendipity – the small beauties and unexpected coincidences that daily life throws up: Paterson's Iranian wife, Laura (Golshifteh Faharani), tells him she’s dreamed of twins – and suddenly he notices twins everywhere.
Poetry is everywhere in Paterson too - whether it's a young girl writing her poems in a notebook while she waits for her parents to collect her, or a rapper (Method Man) practising in a laundrette. For Paterson, everything – looked at carefully enough – can become poetry. Through Adam Driver’s luminous performance - several galaxies far, far away from Kylo Ren - we become absorbed in Paterson’s absorption. We learn little about his former life - a photograph on his bedside table tells us he was once a Marine, and there are occasional hints of a more violent past. But that's pretty much all we discover. What we know is that, besides poetry, the focus of his life is his love for Laura - we feel his reluctance every morning to leave the warmth of her body and the bed they share, his reverence for her beauty, his faith in her creativity. The strength of their marriage is underpinned by the couple's respect for each other, and their acceptance of each other's differences: an approach to life that filters through the whole film.
Paterson is always visually stunning: as its hero walks to and from work at ‘magic hour’, the camera finds beauty in the city’s industrial buildings – the richness of their colours, the symmetry of their contours – as much as in the wildness of the city’s parks and the epic scale of its falls. The film is faithful to the city’s diversity, and honours its history: the amiable bartender at Paterson’s local has a Paterson Wall of Fame, with pictures and cuttings that celebrate famous inhabitants from Alexander Hamilton to Abbott and Costello.
While it's clear that this is a somewhat romanticised version of the city - as Jarmusch has acknowledged, the 'real' Paterson is a much tougher place - it's no utopia. Borrowing the poet and critic Marianne Moore's description of poems as 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', it's obvious that Jarmusch's poetic city is an imaginary garden, although it certainly has its share of toads - conflict, sadness, catastrophe, loss. Nevertheless, Paterson is an optimistic film - and that's why, for me at least, it's an antidote to post-Trump despair. Even when disaster strikes, there is hope of a new beginning. Trump wants to make America great again: the point of Paterson is that greatness is always there, if you choose to look for it. Even the empty page is full of possibility.
No comments:
Post a Comment