by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I was looking for a movie to watch and stumbled across “Paterson” on Amazon Prime Video (free to Prime customers).
The description of the movie reads:
Every day, Paterson adheres to a simple routine: he drives his daily route, he writes poetry into a notebook; he stops in a bar and drinks exactly one beer; he goes home to his wife, Laura. By contrast, Laura’s world is ever changing. New dreams come to her almost daily. The film quietly observes the triumphs and defeats of daily life, along with the poetry evident in its smallest details.
It was, I think, the quietest movie I’ve ever watched. Because of its R rating, I kept expecting some sort of horribly violent or upsetting incident to take the film in another direction. But there was nothing violent or especially upsetting (except, well, maybe for writers. I won’t give any spoilers here). I discovered later that the R rating was because of language, although I didn’t even remember or notice bad language–a sign that it must have been slipped in very naturally.
Although I’m not a poet (at least not a good one), I loved the way that poetry was woven into the everyday (repetitive, routine, and rather boring lives) of the main characters. I’m a subscriber to Poet.Org’s Poem-A-Day newsletter, which sends me a poem to read each day (frequently accompanied by the poet’s thoughts on the poem and a bit of bio). As critic Kate Taylor wrote for The Globe and Mail: “Everyone, it appears, is capable of art.” And: “…The sameness of it all only serves to underline that the creative act belongs to all of us every day.”Continue reading
