It? Let’s say 20 times better than the best X-Men movie, and 200 times better than the most recent Fantastic Four.Īre many, many surprises in the film, as well as a spectacularly (The rights issues of movies starring Marvel charactersĪre pretty baroque, but I won’t bore you with that here.) How good is In a way not previously seen in these licensed-by-but-not-produced-by Studios superhero movies, with a genuinely adult sensibility, and anĪbility to wring compelling human emotion and nuance from the characters Movies Adam Driver Paterson Movie Reviews Posts by Alan David Doane It’s a small diversion anyone might indulge in, and for Paterson, the film, and Paterson, the man, it’s so much more. The delight it delivers in every moment is found in how natural it feels, and in how quickly we come to understand the house Paterson lives in, the neighbourhood he walks every day to get to work, the people on the bus, the people in the bar, Marvin, Laura, all the things that make up this man’s life and drive him to try to capture how that all feels in a few words jotted down in his little notebook, in his spare time. There’s almost no plot to be detected in Paterson, which I found to be one of the best things about it. There is whimsy to be found in Paterson, but it is balanced by a seriousness of purpose and the ingenuity in which every day, so much the same in so many ways, is also completely unique and pregnant with the possibility of joy, or catastrophe. From Laura’s obsession with black and white design (which seems to grow and grow over the course of the film, but to what end?) to a secret war Paterson and the dog Marvin are unknowingly waging against each other, every moment and every element is sharply observed and feels both starkly realistic and utterly magical. There is a universe of wonders to be unpacked in virtually every frame of the film. Or rather, it is, but it is also so much more. Like almost everything in Paterson, it is not what it seems it first. The first poem we hear, about a box of matches, seems at first simple and dull. Laura calls it his “secret notebook,” and tells him he should make a copy of the notebook, maybe share the poems with the world. He carries with him a notebook in which he keeps his prose poetry, which he works on in his downtime during the workday. For (a little over) seven days, we inhabit Paterson’s world in the most intimate of moments, we see his favourite stops along his daily walk to and from work, including a waterfall that adds beauty to his universe and inspires one of the film’s most mysterious and profound moments, a short conversation with a young girl about poetry. We feel like we’d like to have a beer there some time.Īnd so it goes. We get to know the bartender and some of his customers. That’s usually uneventful, but not always. On each night’s walk, Paterson stops in for a beer at the neighbourhood bar. After work, we see him walk home, sometimes uneventfully, sometimes with incredible moments of revelation, then he gets home, has dinner with Laura, then walks the dog, Marvin. Along his route he hears the interactions of his passengers, sometimes smiling at their exchanges, sometimes learning something new about life. Paterson almost always awakens first, checking his watch, and kissing Laura before getting ready for another day driving the bus for the city of Paterson. With segments parsed out for each day of the week, there’s also an episodic feel to the story not unlike Dan Clowes’s Wilson or some Love and Rockets tales.Įach day begins with Paterson and his significant other Laura asleep in bed. Paterson’s life is both blandly pedestrian and filled with miracles and mysteries, and in that way the film strongly evokes the best American Splendor work written by Harvey Pekar. Paterson is a wondrous world in which to spend a couple of hours. I really didn’t want to know any more detail going in, and since it’s not a summer blockbuster or Star Wars sequel (Driver was actually in one, The Force Awakens, a couple of years ago), I easily managed to avoid any spoilers. Adam Driver has long impressed me as a skilled and unique actor on HBO’s Girls, and when I heard the premise for director Jim Jarmusch’s new film Paterson – his character is a bus driver named Paterson who lives and works in Paterson, New Jersey – that was enough for me to want to see the film.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |