In Which Paterson New Jersey Is Exposed Almost Completely

Which Dream Is This?

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Paterson
dir. Jim Jarmusch
118 minutes

Adam Driver's wife Laura (the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani) wakes up every morning and tells him in detail what her dream from the night before was like. Over the period of one week, which is all it takes for Paterson to unfold, these specific descriptions grow increasingly maddening. It does not matter at all how beautiful something is, we surmise from Driver's ongoing reactions to his life. Monotony is a destroyer, killing life wherever it is found.

An enthusiastic misunderstanding of William Carlos Williams is required to enjoy Paterson. Williams was a doctor and a very complicated person. He was not a bus driver or anything like it. Paterson, NJ, in Jarmusch's imitation of it, is not simple either. Different lives and stories weave throughout Driver's day-to-day life. He views them as one views the world from a bus: at a remote distance. In the mornings and the nights he is able to enter some of what he sees in his notebook full of poetry.

Jarmusch is a master at retaining how real conversations flow and react to one another. He never seems to judge any of the people in his story, which makes them seem so much more authentic. You get the sense of individuals who have not been focus-tested or even focused on as antagonists or protagonists. This is is glimpse of living in the world.

Driver carries around a copy of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, and I could not help thinking about how completely different these two people were to write poems that approach each other in tone and subject matter. There is some of that in Paterson — the tendency of people in proximity to each other to parrot and parallel similar behaviors and traits. O'Hara was a flamboyant homosexual who worked at the Museum of Modern Art. Just miles from that place and decades from that time, there is something sad about not being able to reach beyond that aesthetic.

Jarmusch tries to stay true to a cinematic representation of this general artistic sense. He is in love with the way people deal with the problems they face. The miracle of any artistic creation is that it has the possibility of becoming something far different than its creator intended. This never quite happens to Driver's character, which is a shame, but it has happened to Jarmusch here.

Maybe at some point he intended Driver's relationship with his wife to be a happy arrangement, but as the week goes on, we sense a definite distance between the two. He resents his life, and by extension their life. He does what he can to make his wife happy, but never exceeds the limits of his powers. For her part, Laura sees her husband more as an object than a person with his own dreams and needs. For this reason it is hard to call Paterson anything but a very serious tragedy.

It is fun to see Jarmusch dial in the trappings of his modernity into this sterile, timeless world. He has an eye for how we interact with such conveniences, but it is the eye of an old man who resists fading into the firmament of his life. Despite approaching 65, Jim has never lost his basic curiosity regarding what life holds for us. In Paterson he makes a movie that could be profoundly happy for some and deeply depressing for others. This magical style of filmmaking takes on whatever emotion and perspective we bring to it, establishing indeterminancy as a vibrant emotion into which we desire to project ourselves.

As a result of watching Paterson I now find the poetry of William Carlos Williams completely inadequate to the task. It all seems so dated and distant, like Driver when he is propelling the bus through the gross streets of these neighborhoods. Through style, content and the progression of time, Jim Jarmusch pushes us beyond the gift of mere presence. We wish for an artistic expression which can explode through the windows of the vehicle, commas and periods that denote sentences. A marriage that will last.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which They Have Placed Jesus On The Ground

Suited to the Cloth

by ETHAN PETERSON

Silence
dir. Martin Scorsese
161 minutes

Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) is at his absolute best in confinement. His legs seem to only go up to the wooden bars that represent the limits of his world. Abdicating to the sun and air makes him inconsolable – his faith is best processed in private, and he does not like to be disturbed. This makes him on a surface level a decent, albeit somewhat flawed candidate for priesthood.

His friend Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) is much more suited to the cloth. Persecuted by various Japanese warlords/government leaders, the two separate early on in Silence, Martin Scorsese's lengthy adaptation of a novel by the Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō based on oral histories of the period. Both are driven to service the various spiritual needs of this secular country.

Scorsese shows the missionaries at work early on so we get a fairly good sense of what they are there to do. Rodrigues is forced to hold a midnight mass in a dimly light underground cavern – in many ways in Silence, we are meant to think that the mere act of worshiping God is penitence. After he is betrayed to the authorities by his guide Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), Rodrigues has much better accommodations. His hosts place him in a small cell in the middle of a village. In freedom he is forced to eat small, roasted lizards; in jail three meals are delivered to him so he may recover some solidity in the abdomen area.

Garfield is one of those performers who is convincing when he speaks but terrible at listening, which makes him a strange choice for the lead role. He seems mostly to have been selected for his resemblance to the historical Jesus. At one point he sees Jesus in his own reflection, which is either serious apostasy or serious flattery. Either way it does not take much for him to abandon his faith by stepping/falling on an image of Jesus laid on the ground – in doing so he follows in the footsteps of his mentor Ferrera (Liam Neeson).

In one scene, a Japanese convert named Monica asks Rodrigues straight up what the problem is with dying if they are all just going to paradise afterwards. It is the only scene in Silence that possesses a philosophical jocularity. It makes Rodrigues sad to think he causes the death of all the innocent people, even if indirectly, and indicates his lack of faith. The difference between he and his colleague Garupe is made manifest in an astonishing scene where Adam Driver, emaciated and disturbed, tries to save Monica and drowns himself in the effort. Rodridgues screams and cries, but never does anything to help.

Filmed in Taiwan, Silence seems perilously out of time, and that is probably why very few people even managed to view it. The film's hopeless advertising attempted to transform the project into something of a thriller, and final cut retains something of this relentless movement. Scorsese tries very hard not to indulge himself or any of the characters, and the voiceover that he does include is directly necessary to giving us a sense of how we should be processing these events.

Scorsese clearly enjoys himself the most when he can channel Kurosawa's characteristic roving angles in the village scenes. Such moments are brilliant homage, but fall a bit short of a transcendent originality. Even among its stunning sets and energizing performances, the aspects of Silence meant to reassure us we are watching something familiar and understandable end up distracting us from faith. This is a strong thematic point.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.