William Carlos Williams is one of the four major American poets of the twentieth century alongside EK Cummings, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Williams lives and practices medicine near Paterson, New Jersey and uses the name of the town for the epic poem, which, in his words, describes the "similarities between the mind of the modern man and the city." In a note to the first edition of the poem, the author writes that Paterson is a long poem in four parts, in which man is a city that begins, seeks, achieves and ends his life, resembles a city, with all its details that express his personal convictions, the inertial forces that modeling. The first part presents the primary character of the place, the second adds its contemporary features, the third looks for language to vocalize, and the fourth (the river under the waterfalls) reminds the previous three - everything he can achieve in one life. This, in itself, is a sufficient review of Jim Jarmusch's new film. It dominates the warmth of human relations, goodness and understanding, which remain unirogical and impenetrable, in conflict with the established "rules" of most films today. Such a calm and measured film can not be made by any other director except Jarmusch. Like most family, working people, the main character has a daily routine. He wakes up at 6 in the morning, breakfasts a cereal, kisses his beloved and walks to the workplace. He drives bus number 23 through the bright streets of Paterson, whose name he shares. His work allows him with a wide smile on his face to listen sometimes to the entertaining, sometimes intimate or crazy conversations of the passengers who once speak of Italian anarchists, another time for boxing, and once a word about comedian Lou Costello is raised.
In the off-season, Paterson writes poetry, and in essence reminds him of a character of Salinger (a former military man who has nothing to do with the dominating cliche of a macho and whose inner world is rich but rarely outside) and a character of Murakami, whose everyday life is marked by silent existential melancholy. There are almost no conflicts, family dysfunction or mental problems in the movie. The biggest evil is the English bulldog Marvin, who the couple owns and who apparently is not a supporter of his owner. Still, Paterson walks every night to the snarling, snarling monster and ties it to the bar. Inside, the character drinks just one mug of beer and talks to others about the history and present in the city. If the precise time, date, and minutes in which the world ends, reinforce the suffocating sense of determinism, in the Donnie Darko, the recording of the days in Paterson reveals additional strides from the roles of the protagonist and serves as the structure of the visual poem. As we listen to the protagonist recites his poems, the assembly arranges the frames in a similar, measured rhythm. A close-up of Paterson's girlfriend's face appears through the waterfalls and their noise, giving life to the words. Its cracks are not written with a chemical, absent and irritating hearing clatter on a typewriter or keyboard. Instead, with an unassuming but lively handwriting, they appear on the screen, they are in the essence of the hero we see. And if in the first days the verses sound very simple and circumstantial - "Our favorite match boxes are" Ohio Blue Tip" at the moment, then they get metaphorical dimensions (the heads of the matches become" sober and furious"), and towards the end bloom in a love letter: "I became a cigarette, and you in the matches." In a similar way and at first, the ordinary material everyday life is later exposed to our eyes as something special, almost transcendental, revealing even small details, as well as new words and emotions to be captured.
The people of Paterson do not miss the problems, just Jarmusch chooses not to stretch them and turns into an unnecessary drama, while the lively and straightforward image that Adam Driver creates is not meant to impress but merely portray a young artist who is happy in his zeal. Like a hero of a novel by Murakami, Paterson does not seek answers to "big" questions, does not wander between grandioman ambitions, but chooses to look for fascination in the details of his days, the rich variety of human lives and natural wonders that surround him. In a peculiar way, seeing Paterson descend into the basement of his home to write poetry, secluded with his library in a seemingly unappealing dark room, resonates with the memory of Toru Ocka from "The Chronicle of the Bird with Spring," which goes down to the bottom of the well and watch the stars scattered across the night sky. Frederick Elms' operatic work is the invisible character who calmly reveals the beauty of the city. All the time we have the feeling that nothing happens, but it does not happen in a fascinatingly beautiful way. "Paterson " is not the first film of the director, which is a real treasure chest dramatically. And here's the place to get in that it could be Jarmusch's best movie right now. More from "Stranger than Heaven" and "Out of the Law," his characters have always been seekers, whose restless souls wander between the loneliness and the warmth of human ties. Some seek their place in the queue of worldly chaos, others listen for a stranger in the coffee to share a cigarette and a friendly conversation, and others just look for a way to get home. In Paterson, however, we are witnessing a person who has not achieved everything and seems to need no more. There is enough and he seems comfortable in his place. And watching the movie we get infected. It is impossible not to wonder how far the innocent poems of a toddler might be. Watching a dark-eyed and white middle-aged man shy and shyly sharing stories of unsuccessful flirting, the devilishly funny exchange of yo-yo-Helmut's replicas of Night of the Earth comes out of the mind. In both cases, the emphasis is not for the moment to overcome racial differences, because in Jarmush's fantasy they are a priori superfluous. It does not deal with tendentious problems such as racism, feminism, and sexism, for example, and chooses to show how much more enjoyable a life is, in which they do not appear in the collective consciousness. How clumsily we could replace them with a proper joke. At the end of the film, Paterson encounters a man, apparently quite different from himself, but claiming to "breathe poetry". This is where the message is locked - if we can turn a part of our lives into poetry, he thinks. Equally comforting and satisfying existence in the unpardonable chaos in which we were born.
