Paterson (2016)

Jim Jarmusch has made a film in which almost nothing happens, and he has made it with such patience that the near-nothing acquires a strange weight. Adam Driver plays Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, who rises at the same hour, drives the same route, walks the same bulldog, drinks the same beer, and writes poems in a notebook he keeps in his lunchbox. The camera observes. The week repeats. There is a waterfall. That is the film. It is a study in routine as a form of devotion, and it resists every temptation to inflate its small subject into a statement about anything larger. The restraint is the point, and the restraint is nearly total.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a curious specimen: quietly inclusive in its casting, with an Iranian-born actress as the wife and a supporting ensemble that draws from several communities, yet it never pauses to announce this. The diversity is simply the texture of a working-class New Jersey city. Laura, played by Golshifteh Farahani, is a creative person in her own right, dreaming of country music and a cupcake business, and the marriage is drawn as an equal and tender partnership. Her ambitions are granted the same dignity as her husband's poems. There is a faint suspicion of commerce in the way her cupcake venture is handled, a gentle preference for homemade art over the marketplace, but no structural argument is made. The film has no thesis to deliver and no lecture to give, which is the rarest thing a 2016 American film can offer.

The poems, supplied largely by Ron Padgett, carry whatever meaning the images decline to state outright. A Japanese stranger hands Paterson an empty notebook at the Great Falls, and the film closes on a man writing again. Whether that constitutes an ending or merely a Tuesday is left to us. Jarmusch has produced a work of enormous calm and almost no agenda, and in the current climate that absence is itself a kind of provocation.