White Noise, the great novel from Don DeLillo, is many things — a postmodern comedy about academia, a damning critique of consumerism, a meditation on the fear of death, an apocalyptic epic, an experimental deconstruction of American culture. What many believed it wasn’t, however, was adaptable. Noah Baumbach is here to prove them wrong with possibly the boldest and most entertaining film of the year.
White NoisestarsAdam DriverandGreta Gerwigas a married couple (their fourth marriage) during the early ’80s. He’s a college professor (of ‘Hitler studies’) and she teaches classes to the elderly, as well as doing her best with the four children they share from different marriages and together. One day, a train crashes near their college community, releasing a toxic gas that causes an evacuation. The film is told in three parts: before, during, and after the ‘airborne toxic event,’ and was probably the most fun audiences have had at the New York Film Festival, where it premiered as the opening title.
The Postmodern Ballet of Baumbach’s White Noise
The beloved Adam Drivertransforms himself into Jack Gladney, a middle-aged schlubinWhite Noise, complete with potbelly and prescription sunglasses that are halfway between dorky and creepy. He’s incredible here,as is Gerwig, playing his perpetually permed wife Babette (“she has important hair,” one character says). They seem to genuinely love their life, and dance around the kitchen table discussing esoteric topics while their chorus of kids cut in and out like a radio flipping through channels. Even when a traffic accident and Babette’s mysterious reliance on pills cause massive conflict, threatening everyone’s life and sanity, the film carries the same energetic joie de vivre of the Gladneys.
Though the airborne toxic event threatens their lives (in addition to a bizarre, off-market pill named Dylar), the swirling cinema on display here keeps any surreal or silly moments somehow believable and gripping. This is partly because Baumbach films it all so well, bringing to mind the incredibly detailed soundscape and panoply of dialogue inRobert Altman movies. There always seems to be at least one person talking inWhite Noise; if you can keep up, it’s utterly exhilarating, and the most exciting thing onscreen this year.
Aside from the Gladney family (which also includes the truly impressive sibling actors Sam and May Nivola, along with a wonderful Raffey Cassidy, as their children),White Noisefeatures the talents ofthe great Lars Eidinger(an unhinged mystery man), Don Cheadle (a specialist in Elvis studies), André Benjamin (a college professor), and Jodie Turner-Smith (a cold scientist).
The whole film feels like a postmodern ballet (something which becomes literal by its closing credits, set to a brand-new song from LCD Soundsystem), with the anamorphic camerawork seamlessly changing focus and tracking the movements of multiple characters. Aside from the physical motion, the auditory motion is relentless, with the sound design of the film hectically shifting from voice to voice in subtle ways. To just sit back and experience this film is a real treat, and while it may stream on Netflix, watching it in a theater is unforgettable.
Don DeLillo’s Dialogue Comes to Life in White Noise
It’s not just the balletic audio, but the very words each character speaks which is so entrancing. While Baumbach is a modern master of dialogue, the success ofWhite Noiseis ultimately owed to DeLillo, who stuffed so many intimidatingly intelligent and funny lines in one book that it’s surprising each paperback doesn’t immediately explode like some jack-in-the-box, bursting from the seams. Baumbach wisely transfers the novel’s words almost line for line in some places, even if the film is missing some of the greatest portions of the novel (such as ‘the most photographed barn in America’ section).
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It’s an extremely difficult task, however, attempting to film DeLillo’s dialogue (which is intellectual to the point of parody, yet still enlightening). It’s often hard to imagine actual human beings saying the author’s great lines — “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation;” “Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom;” “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.”
Somehow, almost miraculously, Baumbach and his cast manage to pull it off in spades. The filmmaker incorporates a great deal of the original novel’s brilliant dialogue, which is often in stark contrast to Baumbach’s more naturalistic movies, such asMarriage Story, The Squid and the Whale,andFrances Ha. In fact, this entire film seems to be an odd passion project for Baumbach, a true anomaly in his much more grounded career, becauseWhite Noiseis anything but grounded.
From its meticulously choreographed sequences,grand disaster moviescenarios, moments of CGI, and massive assortment of extras and practical effects,White Noiseis the furthest thing anyone would’ve expected form Baumbach, at least on the surface. It’s a big, ridiculous movie based on one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, an epic that earns the lauded moniker of ‘the great American novel.’ However, perhapsWhite Noiseis more akin to Baumbach’s themes than style.
Baumbach, Gerwig, and Driver Bring White Noise to the Screen
Noah Baumbach has always been interested in simultaneously criticizing and celebrating intellectualism. From the bad parenting of brilliant intellectuals inThe Squid and the Whale, to the complete lack of life experience of the intellectual played by Ben Stiller inGreenberg, Baumbach has been like a much more successful Whit Stillman — dissecting, parodying, but also embracing the very white intellectual (usually in a New York setting).
White Noisealso explores Baumbach’s persistent theme of honest marital difficulties. Filmed with his current partner,writer/director/actor Greta Gerwig, whom he met on the set ofGreenbergalongside Baumbach’s then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh,White Noiseis at its most emotionally poignant when it’s focusing on the beauties, mundanity, terrors, and struggles of marriage. These aren’t the funniest or most exciting moments in the film, but Baumbach seems to forge a new path, an emotional core, into DeLillo’s cold novel through this route.
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What makes thisall work is Adam Driverand Greta Gerwig, who somehow manage to adopt the same stilted formalism of DeLillo’s dialogue but with a three-dimensional life outside the novel. What they do here is nothing less than magical, slipping into the postmodern caricatures of human beings, wearing their clothes for a while, and literally bringing them to life. If Baumbach’s film is something distinct form DeLillo’sWhite Noise, it’s because of these two actors, who fully commit to characters who shouldn’t seem real whatsoever. Somehow, in their utter commitment to the formalist dialogue, Driver and Gerwig create real people.
White Noise Might Be the Best Movie of the Year
If this all sounds abstract and confusing, that’s becauseWhite Noiseis as well. This is a film where people study the beauty of car crashes, where they speak poetically about Hitler and Elvis in the same Shakespearean cadence, where they debate over the proper terminology to define the massive death cloud raining disease upon them.
This isn’t a neat movie, and it doesn’t fit into any single genre. It’s a family comedy, and then it’s an apocalyptic nightmare; it’s a suspenseful thriller, and then it’s a cartoonish musical. Just as DeLillo’s novel was so overstuffed with ideas, Baumbach’sWhite Noiseis overflowing with cinema, oozing brilliance in the messiest of ways, jumping from one brilliant scene to another without a moment of respite. It’s sometimes painfully relentless, never once going where you’d expect it to, and thus rewarding multiple viewings (preferably in theaters).
Between the ‘airborne toxic event,’ the evacuations, and the quarantines, much ofWhite Noisefeels like the ultimate Covid film. Exploring the before, the during, and the after,White Noiseseems to be the most comprehensive movie about our collective Covid-19 experience and the subsequent existential traumas most of us have had.
While the third act stumbles quite a bit, tripping over the weight of its own ideas and veering into total silliness, this is the truly perfect Covid film. Despite its flaws and endless contradictions, the experiment which Baumbach undertook here pays off in spades, exploring death and social anxieties better than anything else in recent years. It’s zany but dark; it’s thought-provoking but endlessly entertaining; it has awe-inspiring intelligence, but it’s occasionally incomprehensible. It’s perfectly imperfect, and perhaps the best movie of the year.
Produced by Heyday Films, NBGG Pictures, and A24,White Noisewill be in theaters Nov. 25th, and will be available on Netflix beginning Dec. 30th.
