Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A week in the life of Paterson, a poet bus driver, and his wife Laura, a very creative artist, who live in Paterson, New Jersey, hometown of many famous poets and artists.
Jim Jarmusch's 'Paterson' is a quietly radical film — a meditation on routine, creativity, and the poetry of everyday life. Adam Driver delivers a remarkably understated and deeply felt performance as the poet-bus-driver. Jarmusch's cinematography, with DP Frederick Elmes, finds beauty in repetition and mundane observation, giving the film a distinct visual rhythm that mirrors its subject matter. The film's novelty is genuinely high: its anti-narrative structure, its refusal of conventional drama, and its sincere celebration of ordinary artistic aspiration are wholly distinctive — unmistakably a Jarmusch film. The plot is deliberately minimal, which is the point, but it limits its score. The ending, while thematically resonant (the Japanese poet encounter), is somewhat slight as dramatic resolution, though perfectly in keeping with the film's ethos.