Paterson walks to work and back and then at night he walks his wife’s jealous bulldog, played brilliantly by Nellie who won at Cannes for her role as Marvin, RIP Nellie, to a local bar and sits there shooting the sh*t with the regulars. Ah, there’s the secret to the happy marriage, moderate your time together.
For work Paterson drives a bus and for passion he writes poetry. A very prosaic kind of poetry, the kind that actually seems just like any regular narrative, but written and read aloud (told you this movie is slow, both occur simultaneously on screen) into poetry like style of shortened sentences. It has no rhyme and barely a rhythm, but hey, that’s modern poetry for you. I don’t like it, but Paterson loves it, because the dude got soul. He’s all man, mind you, he can disarm a gun wilding maniac in a second. He’s just a different kind of man you normally see on screen. Representing a welcomingly different brand of masculinity in American cinema. This is something that’s traditionally associated with, say, the energizer bunny named Eastwood, a man who never slows down. The actor turned director for decades now has projected a definitive image of masculinity upon the silver screen, the squinty eyed, shoot first ask questions later, tough guy persona whom men fear and women desire. A quintessential American image, a cowboy. With a very specific sort of machismo to it. The loud kind? How loud, you ask? So loud, his latest movie is literally titled Cry Macho. Eastwood has played the same character for essentially the entire duration of his very long indeed career, a while back he had transitioned his cowboy into a grumpy old man with the heat of gold secreted away beneath the denim somewhere, but it’s still a continuation not a transformation. He has carried on much in the same vein in real life too, his track record with women alone…including leaving behind a storied track of kids, some of whom he refused to even acknowledge for ages, despite the fact that they turned out looking just like him, see his baby clone Scott Eastwood. I’m not ragging on Eastwood, I respect certain aspects of him, mostly as a director, have watched a bunch of his later in life movies, I even get his appeal as an actor and he’s aged notably well and his undeniably good looks and the twinkle in his eye, remarkably enough, persevered. But…it is nice to have an alternative to that. Another ridiculously tall well built man who doesn’t need to snarl, squint or shoot anyone, a man who can go through his day, through his life with a sort of quiet dignity, forbearance and grace. A man who takes pleasure in small things, who finds beauty in small things. A kind man. In popular American mindset, especially of the present day grab ‘em by the p*ssy mentality that by numbers surely offsets any well meant MeToo ideology, most of those attributes would signify weakness and it absolute isn’t it, in fact it’s a strength, a more tensile, more durable sort of strength. Certainly, a more admirable one. And that’s just one of the things I enjoyed about Paterson, a movie that manages to offer great comfort despite being so slow and uneventful. Adam Driver is absolutely perfect in it too, he IS Paterson. Watch and revel in the quiet pleasures of life.
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