Happy Sunday, friends! Hope you’re having a nice weekend (still using active verbs because, well, there’s still some weekend to have).
But also … knowing tomorrow is Monday…
I’m half-tempted to ditch the Cannes theme for the day to mourn the passing of indie writer/director Lynn Shelton, gone too soon at just 54 years old. I had the great pleasure of interviewing her less than a year ago. The conversation was as warm, open-hearted, perceptive and sharp as her films. Check out Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister or Outside In to get a taste of the humanism and naturalism she brought to stories about people who tried — and often struggled mightily — to connect outside of normal societal avenues. (If nothing else, I guarantee she’s directed an episode of any TV show you’ve loved over the past decade.)
Anyways, from that … an incredibly ungraceful pivot. BuzzFeed’s Katherine Miller, a writer who always pens pieces with extraordinary perspective and insight, delivered a brief but deeply moving piece that I’d recommend checking out: “What You Learn When You Read Obituaries.”
A bit of a follow-up from my note on Navajo Nation from earlier this week — you might recall me expressing a bit of hesitation that there was no targeted outreach to the community. Well, here’s an opportunity to do just that thanks to the NDN Collective, which has set up a COVID-19 fund to help support Indigenous artists and small-business owners.
CANNES FACT #6: The festival gives out many awards each year besides the Palme d’Or. Apart from the top prize, none quite captures my attention like the Palme Dog, given to the best canine performance across the Cannes Film Festival. The reigning champion is Sayuri, who played Cliff Booth’s dog Brandy in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 14/10 best boys.
Now, what you came for…
DAY 66: Paterson (available on Amazon Prime)
If ever there were a perfect movie to watch on a low-key Sunday, it would be Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. I can think of few works that possess such a pervasive ambiance of tranquility and a steady pulse of goodness. It’s a cinema that is free of open conflict but is certainly not lacking for tension as Adam Driver’s Paterson, a bus driver and poet who bears the name of the New Jersey town where he lives, attempts to find a balance between the sacred and profane in daily life.
Paterson is not your run-of-the-mill struggling/aspiring artist movie, chiefly because Jarmusch does not set up an either/or dynamic between Paterson’s vocation and avocation. He’s not a bus driver who wants to be a poet. He is both, and the movie never contemplates this being a contradiction. Paterson finds stability in his routine, which the movie follows over the course of an average (though still eventful) week. It’s this very familiarity that allows him to make space in his life for artistic expression and fulfillment through his poetry.
What some might call becoming a careerist sellout actually allows Paterson to find the satisfaction so many artists seek — like his girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), who follows him every whim and restlessly chases a new fad each day. Laura views her craft and creativity as something to be leveraged for business riches or instant success, though Jarmusch never sets her up as a villain for holding this worldview. The contrast makes itself evident through Paterson’s comfort within a circumscribed schedule. His steadfastness in maintaining patterns of living allows him to cut through the haziness of life and see the beauty of the mundane that so many others miss in their rush for achievement. Paterson’s Imagist-inspired poetry, an artistic movement known for homing in on a single object or idea and revealing its inner essence through stark, sparse phrases, stems largely from his ability to quietly observe humanity from behind the wheel. Jarmusch’s filmmaking style, itself highly perceptive of domestic textures and attuned to daily rhythms, echoes Paterson’s words in harmonious image.
Paterson is no naive optimist, though. His lifestyle has not eliminated annoyances or friction altogether. The persistence of his house’s crooked mailbox and a querulously nagging fellow bus driver become running gags. Palme Dog winner Marvin the bulldog (Nellie, somehow the only prize-winner for the film at Cannes in 2016) — adorable as he might be — also poses a real hindrance at one point. But Paterson is at peace, and there’s something quite enviable about the way Adam Driver (one of our few leading men under 40 who can convincingly inhabit blue-collar roles) humbly radiates his decency and contentment.
His modest zen is not some kind of cinematic fantasy. Real Imagist poet William Carlos Williams (who, at the very least, you likely recognize from “This Is Just To Say” either from high school English classes or online memes) lived in Paterson, NJ himself and had a thriving career as a poet … all while serving as a physician in the town for 40 years. Paterson demolishes the choice that so many works about artists suggest — authenticity and struggle vs. corporatism and comfort — as completely erroneous and false. It’s possible to find both serenity in life and satisfaction in art at once.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall
Correcting myself from yesterday: In the email, I mistakenly wrote that Alvin travels on a lawnmower. He travels on a tractor. Clearly someone did not have enough coffee when he sat down to write…