(Reviewed 4.5/5 on letterboxd in April 2017)
People usually don't like films about genuinely nice people; I seem to prefer them. Paterson is one of those nice guys who also happens to be a poet. While his colleagues and friends keep complaining about their lives, Paterson can't ask for more. He has a beautiful girl friend who he says "understands him very well". He has his secret notebook in which he writes words that come to his mind. He prefers not to call himself a poet; he is only a bus driver. For his girlfriend though, he is a poet and she keeps entreating him to make copies of his poems lest they get lost. Paterson also shuns technology and refuses to even carry a smartphone. Jarmusch finds great possibility in this basic premise and through his character's keen eyes and ears, finds poetry in the most unlikely places of a mundane New Jersey town with no personality. Therefore there is poetry to be found in laundromats, curtains, bedrooms, bars, streets, matchboxes, water falls, buses and even in the blank pages of a notebook. As one of his character reveals late in the film - "blank pages reveal endless possibilities" and Jarmusch surely knows how to use them.
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