The High Arts: A Review of Paterson & Saltburn

Paterson (2016) – The Poetry of the Mundane

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson unfolds like a haiku—a meditation on the quiet rhythms of life, carefully arranged yet deceptively simple. Adam Driver plays Paterson, a bus driver in Paterson, New Jersey, who also happens to be a poet. His days are a ritualistic blend of morning kisses, overheard conversations, long walks with his recalcitrant English bulldog, and scribbling poems in a notebook.

There’s a wry amusement in watching a man so utterly unfazed by modern chaos. His wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), a woman of boundless ambition and monochrome enthusiasm, serves as an unintentional comic counterpoint. While she dreams in grandiose black-and-white patterns—cupcake empires, country music stardom—Paterson remains anchored in small, perfect observations.

Jarmusch, ever the connoisseur of deadpan existentialism, offers no dramatic crescendos, no fiery altercations, no grand revelations. The most harrowing moment comes when Paterson’s notebook is destroyed, a catastrophe met with a sigh rather than an outburst. It is the ultimate anti-Hollywood maneuver: resilience, not in grand gestures, but in the decision to simply begin again.

Paterson is the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn library book—quiet, profound, and rewarding for those patient enough to read between the lines. A film where the poetry of life is neither forced nor exaggerated, but merely observed.

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Saltburn (2023) – Decadence with a Dagger Behind Its Back

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn swans into the room with the self-assuredness of an aristocrat who has never held a door open. Opulent, menacing, and utterly drenched in an acid-laced wit, it follows Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a social outsider who ingratiates himself into the orbit of the impossibly wealthy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). A summer spent at Felix’s sprawling estate—Saltburn—becomes a slow-burning exercise in indulgence, manipulation, and the razor-thin line between admiration and obsession.

Fennell wields satire like a stiletto, skewering the oblivious privilege of the aristocracy with such precision that one almost pities them—almost. Felix and his ilk glide through life with effortless hedonism, their excesses as grotesque as they are enviable. Meanwhile, Oliver, ever the outsider, shape-shifts between admiration and quiet calculation. The film teeters between opulent gothic drama and pitch-black comedy, luxuriating in its own aesthetic while hinting at the rot beneath the gilded surface.

If Paterson is about the poetry of the ordinary, Saltburn is about the operatic tragedy of the extraordinary. It dances on the knife’s edge of adoration and revulsion, reveling in the exquisite horror of unchecked privilege and the lengths to which the have-nots will go to infiltrate the world of the haves.

One film finds the profound in the everyday; the other finds the sinister in the extravagant. Together, they paint a picture of humanity in all its absurd, fragile, and deeply poetic contradictions.