PLOT: A neurotic academic (Adam Driver) and his wife (Greta Gerwig), who live with their extended brood in a 1980’s college town, share an unhealthy preoccupation with death. When an “airborne toxic event” contaminates their town, their obsession is exacerbated, leading to both making rash, self-destructive choices that threaten their lives together.
REVIEW: Dom DeLillo’s White Noise holds a lofty place in the American literary canon, but it’s often been considered a work that would be impossible to adapt as a film. Having seen Noah Baumbach’s mega-budget, Netflix-backed adaptation, I’m inclined to agree. For all its ambition, Baumbach’s White Noise is his most frustrating, uneven film, with the themes of the novel (consumerism, academia and mortality) satirized in a way that might have seemed provocative when the novel came out in 1985 but feels outdated in 2022. If the book is the masterwork many say it is, you wouldn’t necessarily know it after watching the film, although that’s not to say White Noise, as a film, is a complete failure.
In many ways, White Noise is immediately classifiable as another big, unwieldy book-to-film adaptation a big name director has to get out of their system before moving on to better things. Baumbach’s not the first auteur to make such a film. Sometimes it works, with his partner Greta Gerwig pulling off her adaptation of Little Women pretty nicely a few years ago, but it often goes awry, such as Mike Nichols’ doing Catch-22, Brian De Palma doing The Bonfire of the Vanities, and more.
The film aims to satirize academia, with Adam Driver’s Jack Gladney, a “Hitler Studies” professor, while his best friend and fellow academic, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), teaches pop culture. The two have an impromptu academic jam session where they compare Hitler and Elvis Presley, to the delight of their students, again, in a scene that might have been scathing and brilliantly post-modern in 1985 but seems old hat nearly thirty years later. Once the film becomes about the “airborne toxic event” that poisons (maybe) the town they’re living in, the film’s focus starts to tighten a bit, but through it all, White Noise feels too condensed. It’s a movie that will likely play much better if you’ve actually read DeLillo’s novel.
While this review probably makes it seem like I hated White Noise, the fact is I have a certain affection for movies like this. Baumbach’s made a big swing, and one has to appreciate his ambition and the fact that Netflix was willing to sink this much money into it. Indeed, there are moments of brilliance. The closing credits feature the supporting cast participating in a brilliantly choreographed dance to LCD Soundsytem’s “New Body Rhumba”. This sequence alone is so brilliant that it makes the movie worth watching. Indeed, it’s a masterclass in directing, as there’s so much going on, especially during the final long shot, which goes on for several minutes, that’s worth further study. I found that I couldn’t take my eyes off Jodie Turner-Smith, who gets next to nothing to do in the movie as one of Driver’s fellow academics but leads the final number.
Otherwise, White Noise has plenty of elements that make it worth a watch, most notably the sharp visuals by DP Lol Crawley and the production design, with the big A&P grocery store set a huge achievement worthy of awards consideration. The cast is a mixed bag, with Driver and Gerwig seeming too young for their roles, even if they’re (a touch unconvincingly) playing about a decade older. Of everyone, Don Cheadle fares the best, with him seeming to master DeLillo’s dialogue better than anyone else, making him a smart bit of casting even though Baumbach changed the character’s race in the process. It’s a creative decision that works, and Cheadle is terrific here (in some ways, I wish he was playing Driver’s role). As narratively wild as the film is, Baumbach’s also made the film somewhat accessible, running a comparatively disciplined 136 minutes. The pace is quick enough that, even when it doesn’t work, the movie never feels like too much of a slog.
Here’s the thing about White Noise. If you asked me whether it was a successful or even a particularly good movie, I would say no. However, it’s a movie I’ve found myself thinking about and pondering more than a lot of the “good” movies I saw this year, so this may be a film that will age well, and possibly become a cult classic down the line. It’s probably Baumbach’s worst film, but even his “worst” has flashes of brilliance and offers the audience enough to chew on that they’ll be thinking about it long after the credits roll.
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