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Paterson Movie Review

Paterson is a 2016 drama film directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Adam Driver. It is a sometimes wonderful, yet ultimately slight movie.

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“She’s okay about it.

She understands me really well.“

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It follows a bus driver who is an aspiring poet and his wife who dreams of becoming a country singer and opening a cupcake business. Yes, that is the plot here and I myself found it to be overly realistic in the sense that you watch real life unfold in front of you too much that it becomes slow and sometimes quite dull.
There is literally nothing cinematic about this movie. And although that realism is admirable in a way, it ultimately hurt the movie and especially its pacing.

The characters are also too boring. The supporting characters are better and more colorful, but Laura was honestly very annoying and sometimes I wanted to punch her in the face. As for the titular protagonist, he should have never been the focus of the entire movie as he can’t carry it whatsoever. The man is inert, too good and just too passive and boring which are not the qualities of a man you would want to follow for two hours.
Golshifteh Farahani did a good job in her frustrating role and Adam Driver, though sometimes problematic, was mostly really good as is expected from his character. I just wish that he got more to do with.
This is the only movie from Jim Jarmusch I have seen so far so I cannot say anything about the quality of his other work, but here he did a good job and he had good vision but he ultimately made too many wrong choices in the script and characterization.

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I know it sounds that I disliked the film, but I actually really liked it in some scenes. It is a solid film which definitely has its highlights. The scene with the little girl is excellent and wonderful and all of the dog scenes were amusing. I also really liked a couple of scenes on the bus as they perfectly showcaced what’s it like to be a bus driver and how many different conversations they overhear during the day. But there are also a lot of unnecessary and weak scenes such as all of those bar scenes and Laura got too many scenes for herself in my opinion. That is why I found the film to be just solid. The two hour format also hurt it immensely.
Paterson is certainly well acted and it has a couple of wonderful scenes including the very interesting bus sequences and the girl poet scene which is heartwarming, but it also has too many scenes which are unnecessary and dull, the film is overly realistic and thus too slow and the titular protagonist is too boring and passive for your main character.