Noah Baumbach returns to adapt Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, tackling morality, hysteria, consumerism and the middle-class family dynamic.
★★★✰✰
When Netflix gave Noah Baumbach $80 million to adapt a novel considered by many to be unadaptable, it raised eyebrows for those familiar with the text—and maybe that’s why White Noise seems to be so divisive. There’s so much dissonance in the film: the choreographed way that characters float through their surroundings; the weighty monologues pulled from the dense text; the grounded dialogue of the contemporary American family that we have become so used to in a Noah Baumbach picture. In a Screen Talk during London Film Festival, Baumbach spoke about adapting this denseness into his own language, “cinematic analogues” as he put it. The craft is there, but something feels lost in translation.
White Noise is told across three chapters, following Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor of Hitler Studies, and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), along with their delightful children, as they deal with their own personal struggles. Namely their fear of dying, only exacerbated by an airborne toxic event caused by a train-wreck just outside of their idyllic Ohio suburb. It’s through these chapters that White Noise stumbles. The first chapter feels like a critique of academic culture, the second veers towards a disaster movie, while the third ventures into an almost neo-noir thriller.
None of these chapters fail in isolation, but they do make the film feel somewhat disjointed, lending credence to notion of the original novel being unadaptable. The throughline of the themes remains across each chapter—a battle with mortality and the hysteria that accompanies that. But there’s a jarring quality to it, nothing feels to quite fit the medium of film.
Despite the structural issues, White Noise is elevated significantly by its cast. Adam Driver returns as Baumbach’s muse once more, delivering a performance full of humour and tenderness, a familial desire to protect that never quite aims in the right direction, but only adds to his allure. Meanwhile, Gerwig delivers a stellar Babette, tackling her own fears of dying through pharmaceuticals and infidelity, and giving White Noise an offbeat counter to the stuffiness of Driver’s Gladney.
There is a certain timeliness to White Noise too, and that is viewing the film through a post-Covid lens. The family bicker over the crisis of the health they may or may not face, mortality anxiety spikes, the family sit in their car critiquing the reactions of others to the toxic cloud compared to their own. It all feels nostalgic of a Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation, but deeply relevant to the events we ourselves endured these past two and a half years.
Perhaps the best way to sum up White Noise is that it contains a myriad of both triumphs and issues, and there’s no better illustration of this than its closing credit sequence. The terrific cast, back in their home away from home, the altar of consumerism that is the supermarket, close out the film with an ensemble dance number set to the latest track from LCD Soundsystem. Beautifully staged, it might be one of the best scenes from 2022—but when the most memorable part of the film is its end credits, there might be a problem with the rest of it.
Verdict
White Noise is a perfect mixed-bag of a film. Its darkly comic gags along with the sensitive chemistry between Driver and Gerwig are worth seeing, as is witnessing a director take a huge swing by stepping out of their comfort zone. It doesn’t always work, and quite possibly should have stayed as a novel to never be adapted, but Noah Baumbach has earned enough cache to give White Noise a chance.
Words by Jack Francis
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