We Have Plenty of Matches in Our House

The description from VIFF had me at “bus driver and poet.”

This movie takes you through a week in Paterson’s life (played by the subtle and brilliant Adam Driver). Each day doesn’t look too different than the other. Paterson wakes up next to his wife, retrieves his work clothes from the bedroom chair, eats cheerios while examining a box of Ohio Blue Tip matches, walks to work, writes a few lines of poetry in his secret notebook before listening to his boss’s litany of things bothering him, responds that he’s okay whenever he’s asked, smiles to himself at the bus conversations he overhears, drives around Paterson, New Jersey, the city he shares a name with, eats his lunch at the Great Falls, walks back to his modest house, straightens out the mailbox that his English bulldog Marvin dislodges every day, greets his artsy wife who is happy to see him and tell him about her latest career idea, takes the dog for a walk after a healthy but usually unappealing dinner, leashes Marvin outside his favourite bar while he enjoys a drink and conversation with the owner, comes home, kisses his wife, and goes to bed to repeat it all the next day.

There are a few deviations in this routine but that’s pretty much it for seven days. You’re probably thinking that sounds boring but it really isn’t, and it’s a long movie for not having a plot—just shy of two hours. Could it be that the ordinary is actually quite interesting? That a quiet life is worth celebrating? That a content marriage is worth showing?

This is a movie you could picture yourself in. No great thing happens, just a bunch of small things—some of which may mean something, some of which may not.

The poems were my favourite part, voiced by Adam Driver who reads them as if they could be his while the words come up on screen in his handwritten scrawl. We are given just a few lines at a time, echoing real life where we don’t finish drafts all in one go. We are constantly interrupted. And then our desire is finally satisfied when we hear the poem whole. I left wanting to hear them again. All the poems in Paterson are written by Ron Padgett, whom I am delighted to have been introduced to thanks to this movie. He’s a perfect match to this film because his poetry is all in the details.

Love Poem – by Ron Padgett

We have plenty of matches in our house.

We keep them on hand always.

Currently our favorite brand is Ohio Blue Tip,

though we used to prefer Diamond brand.

That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches.

They are excellently packaged, sturdy

little boxes with dark and light blue and white labels

with words lettered in the shape of a megaphone,

as if to say even louder to the world,

“Here is the most beautiful match in the world,

its one and a half inch soft pine stem capped

by a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious

and stubbornly ready to burst into flame,

lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love,

for the first time, and it was never really the same

after that. All this will we give you.”

That is what you gave me, I

became the cigarette and you the match, or I

the match and you the cigarette, blazing

with kisses that smolder toward heaven.

 

I doubt everyone sitting in the movie theatre was a poetry lover, but Padgett’s poems seem like the easiest entry into this form for even the most hardened sceptic. Like the film, the poem doesn’t try too hard to be more than it is. It doesn’t use fancy language or opt for easy emotion.

It talks straight and simply, like it is having a conversation with you. Like it knows what it is and is content to be just that. Nothing more, nothing less.

I want more movies like this. I want more poetry like this.