{"id":2910,"date":"2016-11-26T01:13:47","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T01:13:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/11\/26\/adam-drivers-paterson-will-be-treasured-for-years-review\/"},"modified":"2016-11-26T01:13:47","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T01:13:47","slug":"adam-drivers-paterson-will-be-treasured-for-years-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/11\/26\/adam-drivers-paterson-will-be-treasured-for-years-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Adam Driver’s Paterson will be treasured for years – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Telegraph \/\u00a0Tim Robey\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Y<\/span>ou\u2019ve beheld Adam Driver as Kylo Ren; now meet Kylo Zen. In Jim Jarmusch\u2019s new film Paterson, he plays a guy called Paterson, who happens to live in Paterson, New Jersey, his birthplace, where he drives a bus (number 23) with his surname naturally emblazoned on it.<\/p>\n

If you met him, say, at the neighbourhood bar where he drinks a beer every night, and mentioned this coincidence, Paterson would smile, without making much of a fuss of it. He\u2019s philosophical about most things, and not much of a talker. He listens, though. He\u2019s quietly fascinated by humankind, eavesdropping on his passengers\u2019 chatter \u2013 among them two teenage radicals, cameos by those fast-growing kids from Wes Anderson’s\u00a0Moonrise Kingdom \u2013 as if committed to learning a little something from everyone.<\/p>\n

He listens, and he writes \u2013\u00a0methodically composing poems in the notebook he takes to work each day. The first of these we hear starts as an ode to the form-and-function beauty of Ohio Blue Tip matches, and then evolves, by steps, into a graceful minimalist love poem. It\u2019s delectable writing \u2013 Jarmusch makes good in his screenplay on an early ambition to be a poet, before he got into filmmaking. Paterson composes to us aloud, his handwriting flickers up on screen, and we get the idea.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>his film is his life, so low-key you could think of it as a scale being played in thin air, off the left-hand end of a Steinway. It\u2019s truly special \u2013 a breath-catching lesson in aloneness, but one that\u2019s fond of good company, too. One-off encounters; daily coincidence; and everything that watching the world attentively can tell us.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s structured as precisely a week in Paterson\u2019s life, and has a mantra-like, soft-tread rhythm: save for the weekend, every day follows the same pattern, differing only in the details. Paterson\u2019s body clock wakes him some time between 6am and 6.30, and after snuggling briefly with his wife Laura, played by the stunning Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani, he gets up.<\/p>\n

He then walks to the bus depot, taking his time in the morning sun, past the town\u2019s superb old warehouses and factories \u2013 a reminder that this was an early birthplace of American industry, on a site chosen by founding father Alexander Hamilton (yep, the one from the Broadway musical) near the Passaic River\u2019s Great Falls.<\/p>\n

After his driving shift\u2019s over, he travels the same way back, and later in the evening he\u2019ll walk Marvin, an eccentric British bulldog who stares and schemes at home from his trusty armchair, to that bar, where the dog\u2019s left grumbling on the pavement, and Paterson goes in to shoot the breeze \u2013 or at least have it shot at him.<\/p>\n

J<\/span>armusch needs us to know that there\u2019s another work of art called Paterson, namely the five-volume magnum opus written by William Carlos Williams in the mid\u00a020th century \u2013 a copy of which we espy on its namesake\u2019s desk, with those waterfalls pictured on the cover. Williams is a ghostly inspiration here, an animating mentor-figure, even if Laura keeps muddling his name up, while Paterson is far too modest to admit his own work might want publishing.<\/p>\n

He writes for himself: down in the couple\u2019s basement, he has a study-nook that\u2019s a refuge for reflection, a snug for words. Upstairs feels more like Laura\u2019s domain, in part because of her indefatigable urge to furnish it from floor to ceiling in a black-and-white colour scheme, when she\u2019s not baking black-and-white cupcakes all day, painting monochrome stripes onto herself, or ordering a black-and-white \u201cHarlequin\u201d guitar off the internet.<\/p>\n

S<\/span>he\u2019s a woman of projects: on Monday she\u2019s all about opening a cupcake shop; by Tuesday she\u2019s dreaming of country-singer stardom again. She\u2019s very sweetly crazy, and you can see how Paterson adores her, while gently humouring everything about her that\u2019s as nutty as a fruitcake. Farahani\u2019s adorably daft performance manages to avoid all the manic-pixie traps that might have sprung up beneath it \u2013 just as Paterson does, we cherish our time with Laura, and we also value a bit of sanity and space.<\/p>\n

The film has incidents rather than plot: disruptions, minor mishaps, happy accidents. How Jarmusch takes this match-stick house of nothings and fills it with such calm and wisdom is a mystery with only one real answer: he\u2019s an artist.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he film has its eyes and ears open. But it also has a lot to do with Driver, whose mellow charisma is hiding something. He never cries in the film, but often seems on the verge of it, finding the wavelength of this man whose equanimity, seemingly perfect, conceals a daily search for meaning that\u2019s his alone.<\/p>\n

Aloneness \u2013 even within this happy relationship \u2013\u00a0is his choice. And what\u2019s consoling for us, and will honestly make this a film a treasure for years to come, is getting to partake in it. In a culture of manic oversharing, Paterson undershares \u2013 he doesn\u2019t even have a mobile phone, let alone social media.<\/p>\n

Like Forest Whitaker in the wonderful Ghost Dog \u2013 the earlier Jarmusch film this chimes with most, if you strip the plot away \u2013 Paterson is an island, refuting the maxim that no man is. He clings to ritual, aims to live undemonstratively and understand what\u2019s thrown his way. He wants every day to be a blank page in the same book \u2013 one worth filling, but only with the right words. It\u2019s an honour to know him, and a serious ache to say goodbye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Telegraph \/\u00a0Tim Robey\u00a0 You\u2019ve beheld Adam Driver as Kylo Ren; now meet Kylo Zen. In Jim Jarmusch\u2019s new film Paterson, he plays a guy called Paterson, who happens to live in Paterson, New Jersey, his birthplace, where he drives a bus (number 23) with his surname naturally emblazoned on it. If you met him, … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAdam Driver's Paterson will be treasured for years - review - Thunderbird Entertainment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thunderbird.tv\/2016\/11\/26\/adam-drivers-paterson-will-be-treasured-for-years-review\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Adam Driver's Paterson will be treasured for years - review - Thunderbird Entertainment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Telegraph \/\u00a0Tim Robey\u00a0 You\u2019ve beheld Adam Driver as Kylo Ren; now meet Kylo Zen. 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