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I have been searching for a movie like this for so long.
Patterson is a movie about the mundane. The everyday. True life.
If you’ve turned on your tv in the last 5 years, or used any of the most popular social media apps, you would know that the craziest stories are what keep us entertained. We consume our media in 30 second bits and our attention can only be held by the most ludicrous of media. Living in a post-pandemic world, it sometimes feels that we have entered into a new era of technological-dependance that draws us in and locks us onto our screens. The media that we are seeing doesn’t help with our mental health and loneliness, either. We are constantly being drawn onto apps that then feed us posts, images, and videos of the “ideal life”. Whether that be a life that someone else is living or that we could live (if we buy this product or change this thing about ourselves), the ideal life is in the box that is our phone and not around us.
So now back to Patterson. Patterson is the exact opposite. This movie is about a bus driver, named Patterson, living in a small town, also named Patterson. This movie has no heroic event that alters his life, he never needs to change who he is, and his life is steady throughout the film.
Patterson is played by Adam Driver and the film is directed by Jim Jarmusch. Driver is someone who is hard to diminish as an actor. He is a big presence often in powerful and strong roles (hello, Kylo Ren!). Yet, in this film he plays a quiet and soft man. His character is never the first to start a conversation; he is a listener and not much of a talker. This allows us to sit in on the scene and imagine we are taking in the day alongside Patterson. As a bus driver, he is able to listen to his community day after day as they hop on and off of his bus. We hear about small children talking to each other about their Halloween costumes and two young men chatting about how a relationship is progressing … normal people things! Patterson’s day-to-day is always the same. He wakes up everyday the same, his clothes are laid out everyday the same, he walks to work the same route, everyday the same, and so on and so forth. If we’re being honest, this is a lot like myself.
Everyday, if I can help it, I wake up the same, my work day starts the same, and it’s not until after 5pm when my days start to vary. So how refreshing is it to see a character in a movie love this lifestyle of theirs. We hear it constantly said on social media to “romanticize your life”, but what does this mean? Does this mean gaslighting ourselves into believing we like our reality, or being truly satisfied with the expected and the monotonous?
This could have easily been a movie about a man going crazy living in a Groundhog Day reality. Instead, it is about a man who is fully content and happy with his life. Something that we don’t often find in our current media stream or on our social media feeds.
So if you are looking for a film about everyday life, and the beauty in it, check out Patterson!
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