★★★★
‘Feel-good’ films slot into their own distinct subgenre nowadays.
The phrase is a marketing tool more than anything, designed in no small part to pigeonhole films that sweep award ceremonies and pack out multiplexes – films concerned with the triumph of the little man and the beating of unbeatable odds.
In that way, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is not necessarily a feel-good film as one might know it. The work is curiously, notably devoid of adversity – there are no real catastrophes for our hero, Paterson (Adam Driver) to overcome, nor are there any touching monologues about crisis and catharsis to be delivered.
A bus driver who happens to share a name with the city in which he resides, Paterson writes poetry by the side of a waterfall while eating lunch from a pail adorned with a picture of Dante, and infallibly rises at 6:30 each day while his partner (Golshifteh Farahani) sleeps.
So no, the film contains not a single moment in which the audience is meant to champion its outsider hero, nor is Paterson even really an outsider hero. He’s just a man, played with understated perfection by Driver, and his desires and accomplishments are subdued in their nature. This is a film in which the minutiae of life is treated with the same dignity as major plot points in a Hollywood blockbuster – in which an overheard conversation on the bus takes up five uninterrupted minutes and is then never mentioned again.
The humour is deadpan, as Jarmusch’s always is, and ‘jokes’ are often coincidences and observed absurdities rather than traditional laugh-out-loud moments. This seasoned filmmaker revels in setting up visual motifs, and the film is dominated by shots of twins, black-and-white stripes and cupcakes.
The spirit of writer William Carlos Williams, that martyr of the minute and a one-time resident of Paterson, guides the film, and his poetry provides both one of Paterson’s ‘major’ plot developments and its closest reference point. Like Williams, Jarmusch rejects large-scale plotting and gives over to the moment itself, and the film revels in random encounters and tiny victories.
Paterson won’t be for everyone, and is not the kind of film that will have the audience on its feet cheering by its conclusion. But it is a feel-good film in the truest sense of the phrase; a film full of pure, simple kindness, and one that gives off a warmth so genuine that it shimmers.
Patersonopens in cinemas Monday December 26.
