Phantom screens ohio8/31/2023 ![]() ![]() Paterson might be a blue-collar worker who’s tied to a potentially numbing routine, but within that routine his artistry can flourish. He’s attuned, in particular, to the kind of rituals that constrict in order to liberate. If you were to call him a symbolist, he’d say his aim is to evoke the texture of ordinary life. If you were to call him a naturalist, he’d point to all the artificial structures within his films. It is also a peculiar combination of casual and deliberate, which is Jarmusch’s ever-shifting sweet spot. In his film, Jarmusch follows his own river to create his own cinematic poem, but he is scrupulously faithful to Williams’s most famous tenet: “No ideas but in things.” The film is not realistic, but it is grounded. Williams’s long first part is, in any case, the best, cementing his documentarist impulses: “I took the river as it followed its course down to the sea all I had to do was follow it and I had a poem,” he wrote. “Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls / its spent waters forming the outline of his back,” wrote Williams in the first installment of his epic poem, “Paterson,” which he began in 1926 and hadn’t finished when he died nearly four decades later. He chats with the bartender, Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), about the photos on the wall depicting former Paterson residents, including Lou Costello, Allen Ginsberg, and, of course, William Carlos Williams. In the evenings, after dinner, he parks his little bulldog, Marvin, in front of a bar and nurses a beer while dramas - among them the plight of a rejected lover (William Jackson Harper) - erupt around him. He’s in a porous, meditative state, an alert trance. He notices patterns in passersby, many of whom happen to be twins. On the bus, Paterson listens to different sorts of people having intense conversations behind him. One poem uses a box of matches (Ohio Blue Tip) as a springboard to depicting love, from the slant of the letters to the gesture of lighting a cigarette. As he waits for his supervisor’s signal to begin his route, he pulls out his notebook and scribbles lines of poetry that appear onscreen in an elegant scrawl while he speaks them aloud. He wakes up at the same time on all but one of the film’s weekdays (he has an internal clock) kisses his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) and walks to the bus depot, sometimes stopping in front of the Great Falls to sit and write. Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson depicts one week in the mundane but highly symbolic life of a Paterson, New Jersey, bus driver and poet (Adam Driver) whose name also happens to be Paterson. ![]()
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