White Noise (2022)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Written by Noah Baumbach
Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle
Release Date November 25th, 2022
Published November 18th, 2022
Netflix
I've never read Don Delillo's much heralded 1985 novel, White Noise. Others have told me it is quite brilliant. I'm told it has a visionary quality that makes it quite worthy of being adapted at any time. From what I know about White Noise, Noah Baumbach, director of intimate dramas about awkward families and spiky characters, would not be the most likely choice to direct this material. The story carries elements of science fiction, high minded satire ala Joseph Heller, and a borderline unfilmable obsession with death. Unfilmable in that most audiences won't find the theme one they want to watch play out in a movie.
It's rather perfect that an iconoclast like Baumbach would choose something so seemingly impossible as his first big budget directorial effort. It's also kind of perfect that he's taken millions of dollars of Netflix money and made an indie movie on a blockbuster budget. White Noise is filled with showy, dramatic speeches, and wildly strange moments of action fitting of a director of esoteric human drama. White Noise is filled with numerous themes but none of which seems to stand out or find any satisfying resolution.
Adam Driver stars in White Noise as J.A.K or Jack Gladney, father of 5 children from 4 marriages to five different women. His new wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), shares with Jack a despairing fear of death. What begins as a somewhat romantic, fatalistic conversation about how they can't live without each other and making the case that one should die before the other in order to save them from comparative states of horrific grief.
Babette's fear of death manifests in her beginning to take an experimental drug that is supposed to relieve her of the fear of death. Instead, the drug just effects Babette's memory in general making her forgetful but still deeply in fear of death. For Jack, he expresses his fear of death through his work as a professor at the fictional College on the Hill, located somewhere in Ohio. Jack has earned fame in Academic circles for his intensive course, Hitler Studies, where he opines on the evils of the dictator and the culture that made him possible.
At one point, White Noise comes to a complete halt for a dueling speech between Driver's Jack and his best friend, Professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle). In an incredible verbal dance, Jack and Murray each pontificate about the area of their expertise. Jack, of course, knows all about Hitler while Murray's unique field of study is Elvis Presley. The pair find strange and fascinating parallels between Hitler and the King of Rock N'Roll in each having attachment issues related to their mothers, their absent fathers, and their incredible ability to draw and compel a crowd.
Neither Driver and Cheadler nor Jack and Murray are competing here. Rather, the pair is improvising a intricate dance of intellects that dovetail off of one another, building on each others points, coming to the point of interrupting each other but never seeming to steal the attention away. At one moment, Jack recedes into the crowd of gathering professors and students, mesmerized by their tete a tete and then he re-emerges in a different part of the crowd, rising from a crouch to take hold of the scene, and Murray steps back in awe to enjoy his fellow Professor's presentation.
It's the best scene in White Noise and it is so good that I want to recommend the movie solely based on the quality of Driver and Cheadle's magnificent duet. I want to recommend it but I am not sure that I can. You see, what remains of White Noise following this bravura effort is far too strange, obtuse, and esoteric that I am not sure who the audience for this is meant to be. White Noise has director Baumbach tapping various styles from other directors from Altman to Wes Anderson to Mike Nicholas and Stanley Kubrick. The homage throughout White Noise is fascinating but I am not sure it adds up to anything in the end.
I'm told that Delillo's novel actually thrives on trainwrecking the narrative into some inescapable place and leaping to a new narrative thread. White Noise, in fact, depicts an actual trainwreck that serves the purpose of shifting the narrative from quirky academic satire to an equally quirky survival thriller. The family is forced to flee from their home after a train is hit by a semi-truck carry flammable chemicals. The train was carrying toxic waste and the result is what the book and film call an 'Airborne Toxic Event.' Jack ends up being exposed to the Toxic Event and assumes that it is going to kill him but that is only used to underline his ongoing obsession with death.
The Airborne Toxic Event portion of White Noise includes a chase scene and chaotic, end of the world preaching and then just peters out into the family returning home and going on with their lives. It's weirdly clever and provides yet another narrative trainwreck into another story, though slightly less successful than the actual trainwreck scene. The final act then becomes a domestic drama as Jack investigates Babette's experimental drug. I doubt that I can spoil the movie but I am nevertheless going to end my description there.
White Noise is a particularly unsatisfying experience. On one hand, I love some of the ambition that Baumbach demonstrates. The stuff with Driver and Don Cheadle and Hitler and Elvis is genuinely riveting. Driver's performance is weird, as is Cheadle and Greta Gerwig's performances but they are entertainingly weird, they match the weird tone of White Noise. The acting is really first rate in terms of how it marries with the wild ideas of White Noise. That said, I can see where a more mainstream audience than myself, might be put off by the theatrics, the showiness, and the un-ironic bigness of these performances.
I also love the film credits which encompasses the final scene of the movie to the very end of the last credit on screen. It's essentially a music video reminiscent of the wildly anarchic and inventive style of a Spike Jonze video. The lengthy choreographed sequence marries dancers and non-dancers a like in a series of coordinated movements that mimic and mock the daily mannered pleasantries of grocery stores in our obsessive consumer culture. Actual dancers glide amid the coordinated movements of shoppers, smiling, everyday consumers, going about the business of selecting their varieties of brands and filling carts to overflow with item after item.
Consumer culture is among the many broad targets of White Noise though what point is being made about consumer culture is far too broad to determine. That really is the defining quality of the movie White Noise, it's a scattershot blast of vague commentary on modern life, some of it quite interesting and entertaining and quite a lot of it presented without much insight, humor, or meaning. I could excuse that as being just like life where not everything has a deeper meaning but that feels like a cop out by both me as a writer and critic and by the movie which appears incapable of settling on any kind of point.
Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media.
