Paterson, N.J., with a population of nearly 150,000, is one of the most blighted, crime-ridden cities in the United States. It was at one time, in the early 19th century, the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution, its Great Falls of the Passaic River generating the power that would drive the city's silk mills and other industries. That was long ago. Like many of the rust-belt cities of the American Midwest, it lies in ruins.
The protagonist of the new movie Paterson, played by Adam Driver, is a bus driver who writes poetry. Driving a municipal bus in Paterson is, surely, one of the most terrifying jobs in America. Dreamy, young Caucasian males who compose poems in their heads are not to be found driving the city buses of Paterson, trust me. And if they did, their careers would almost certainly be very, very brief.
Here are two quotes from Paterson's poems. From Another One … I knock off work,/have a beer at the bar./I look down at the glass/and feel glad …" And from another, which begins: "I'm in the house./It's nice out: warm/Sun on cold snow …"
However deliberately these poems aspire to be plain, in sentiment and diction, I fail to see the artistry or charm in a sequence of declarative sentences that even a 12-year-old would probably feel compelled to vary in syntax and embellish.
Adam Driver is the bus driver-cum-poet in Paterson, a cringe-worthy film that, like almost all others, fails to capture the life and struggles of an artist.
Mary Cybulsky
Were the poetry our protagonist writes not so self-consciously childish and faux-naif as to be cringe-worthy, might the movie have been more bearable? I hardly think so. The entire affair is self-consciously faux-naif and cringe-worthy. But more to the point, with notably very few exceptions, all movies about artists, be they painters, composers or writers, fail.
One might only speculate as to why that is, and they tend to fail in different ways. I suppose the most common sort of characterization of "the artist" is the Irving Stone-type (van Gogh, Michelangelo), the grimacing, hyperventilating, tormented nut-job and outcast, railing at the heavens, suffering greatly at his enterprise. Another popular characterization is the drunk with an aggravated impulse-control disorder. This is a type that I'm very familiar with and actually exists in fair numbers; the other almost never at all. In fact, the standard-issue "poet-artist" in North America for the past couple of generations teaches in a master of fine arts program at a university and possesses the temperament of sales person or mid-level bureaucrat, but with an exalted opinion of himself.
Our movie poet, Paterson, and his wife Laura, played by Golshifteh Farahani, live in a little house with a bulldog named Marvin. Every day – the movie takes place over the course of seven days – the poet awakes between 6 and 6:30 a.m. and walks to work through the Great Falls Historic District, which the city has restored at considerable expense, and, unlike the rest of Paterson, has some charm. He has a poem in his head. His wife stays at home and fashions white-on-black patterns on curtains, woodwork, dresses, cookies, whatever is at hand and not already thus patterned. She is otherwise useless, but affectionate.
The husband and wife are "young and in love," and both are assigned by the director, Jim Jarmusch, to simulate the affect of being heavily dosed, probably on Quaaludes. In the evening, the poet walks home from the bus barn to his little house, has dinner with said wife, and then takes Marvin the bulldog out for a walk, stopping every night at a bar with "endearing" method actors, black and white, (viz the TV drama show Playhouse 90 from the late 1950s), who get on famously. This would be a most unlikely scenario in Paterson, by the way, where race relations could hardly be more toxic. And Marvin, who is left outside the bar, would almost certainly be stolen or shot from a passing car long before our poet has finished his beer.
Adam Driver’s eponymous Paterson seeks creativity in his small-town life with wife Golshifteh Farahani’s Laura.
Mary Cybulski/Amazon Studios & Bleecker Street
Every day, times seven, just like that. The denouement, such as there is one, takes place near the end of the film when Marvin the bulldog, while the principals are having a night out, eats the "secret" notebook, the only copy, where all the poet's poems are scribbled. The "heartbreak" is "palpable" on their return. But for me, I haven't experienced such relief in a movie theatre since Dennis Hopper, in his role as an insufferable hippie, gets blown off his chopper by an ill-tempered cracker at the end of Easy Rider. Marvin the bulldog received the Palm Dog at the Cannes Film Festival for this role.
The presiding poetic spirit in Paterson is the great American poet William Carlos Williams, who wrote a long poem entitled Paterson, but unlike Allen Ginsberg, Lou Costello and Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, lived in nearly Rutherford, not the city of Paterson. He would, I feel almost certain, have been deeply offended by the movie, and rightly so.
Williams was one of the pillars of literary modernism in English-language poetry along with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Among his most significant achievements, and the ones that has most influenced my own work, are incorporating the American idiom, the words and syntax to be found in the speech of ordinary people, into poetry and making the "everyday" a suitable subject for poetry. Which is not to the same thing as "I'm in the house./It's nice out …"
There does exist one, and only one, first-rate movie about a poet: Stevie (1978) about the wonderful British poet Stevie Smith, played by Glenda Jackson. Do yourself a favour and check it out.
August Kleinzahler is a poet who was born in Jersey City, N.J. and is now based in San Francisco. He is the author of 15 books of poetry, and was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2004, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.