Deadline Decompression: Paterson
This is an article I wrote for the University of Exeter’s student newspaper, Exeposé, and appeared in its print edition.
After your Nth marathon library session followed by that cold, dark walk home, it can often be hard to even allow yourself to relax at the end of it all. Up until that final submission, it can sometimes feel like you’re wired in – your mind consumed by that unresolved problem, that paragraph that you just can’t get right. Deadline season is a tense time at its easiest. At its worst, it can be suffocating. So, there’s something immediately comforting about being sat down and told that it’ll pass – there’ll always be something that’ll come along and knock you off balance, but you will bring it back around with a little patience.
Paterson, a gentle film structured around a week in the life of a poetry-writing bus driver (Adam Driver), does just that. For Paterson – the bus driver’s name but also, ironically, his town’s too (it’s a Jim Jarmusch film) – daily life is built on routine. It’s not a depressive existence by any means, it’s a rhythmic one, and with room enough for some improvisation. There’s a beauty in the minimalism; Paterson is content. When things inevitably derail, then, it feels like a bomb has dropped, but what’s so special about this film is that even when it does, life moves on. Paterson starts again. It’ll all be okay. It’ll pass.