Review: The banal looks beautiful in the poetic ‘Paterson’

Waking up. Making coffee. Walking to work. Talking to coworkers. Coming home. Walking the dog. Going to the bar. Repeating it all again. These are the mundane activities Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson ” is made of. While they’re the things most of us do without much thought, and often with a little dread, in “Paterson,” they’re everything, they’re life and they’re beautiful.

This quiet sentimentality is because Jarmusch is showing us this world through the eyes of a peculiar man named Paterson (a subtle, wonderful Adam Driver), a bus-driving poet in Paterson, New Jersey, who favours William Carlos Williams, author of the epic poem “Paterson.” He lives with a beautiful woman, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and he goes about his life gently, often letting his poems take over his thoughts. As he walks through the brick-lined, industrial landscape of Paterson, we hear him working out a poem in his head. “We have plenty of matches in our house … we have plenty of matches in our house …” He writes it down when he can and expands from there.

This happens often, but instead of just audio, Jarmusch scribbles Paterson’s verses across the screen, daring us to really consider the words. This film isn’t some quirky gimmick about a blue collar fellow with an artist’s heart; it’s deeply sincere and lifelike.

Part of that is because Paterson’s world is full of characters — real-ish seeming people who come in and out of his life. He seems to delight in the randomness. When Paterson drives, he takes in his environment, listening and enjoying the conversations between the two kids whose feet don’t touch the floor of the bus talking about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who is from Paterson and “looks like Denzel Washington,” or the men talking about girls and obviously lying to each other but both accepting the other’s delusions, or even the teens (who some viewers might recognize as the kids from “Moonrise Kingdom”) talking about anarchy. He also tolerates his perpetually aggrieved co-worker who always has a laundry list of woes to rattle off when presented with a courtesy “how are you?”