white noiseDon DeLillo’s great novel is many things – a postmodern comedy about academia, a scathing critique of consumerism, a meditation on the fear of death, an apocalyptic epic, an experimental deconstruction of American culture. What many thought it wasn’t, however, was customizable. Noah Baumbach is here to prove them wrong with possibly the boldest and most entertaining movie of the year.
white noise stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig as a married couple (their fourth marriage) in the early 1980s. He is a college professor (of “Hitler Studies”) and she teaches seniors and does her best with the four children they share from different marriages and together. One day, a train crashes near their college community, releasing a poisonous gas that triggers an evacuation. The film is told in three parts: before, during and after the “toxic event in the sky” and was probably the most fun audiences have ever 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 Driver transforms himself into Jack Gladney, a middle-aged schlub in white noise, complete with a big belly and prescription sunglasses that are somewhere between dorky and creepy. He’s incredible here, as is Gerwig, who plays his eternally permed wife Babette (“she’s got important hair,” says one character). They seem to really love their lives dancing around the kitchen table discussing esoteric topics as their choir of children switches on and off like a radio flipping through channels. Even when a traffic accident and Babette’s mysterious dependence on pills cause huge conflicts that threaten everyone’s lives and sanity, the film carries the same energetic joie de vivre as the Gladneys.
Even if the toxic event in the sky threatens their lives (alongside a bizarre, off-market pill called Dylar), the whirlwind cinema seen here keeps even the surreal or wacky moments somehow believable and gripping. This is partly because Baumbach films it all so well, reminiscent of the incredibly detailed soundscape and arsenal of dialogue in Robert Altman films. There always seems to be at least one person talking white noise; if you can keep up, it’s extremely exciting and the most exciting thing to see on screen this year.
Aside from the Gladney family (which also includes the truly impressive sibling actors Sam and May Nivola, along with an amazing Raffey Cassidy, as their children), white noise features the talents of the 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 movie feels like a postmodern ballet (something that becomes literal by the end credits, set to a brand new song from LCD Soundsystem), with the anamorphic camera work seamlessly shifting focus and following the movements of multiple characters. Aside from the physical movement, the auditory movement is relentless, with the film’s sound design shifting frantically from voice to voice in subtle ways. To just sit back and experience this movie is a real treat, and while it can be streamed on Netflix, watching it in a theater is unforgettable.
Don DeLillo’s Dialogue Comes to Life in White Noise
It’s not just the ballet-like audio, but the words each character speaks is so mesmerizing. Although Baumbach is a modern master of dialogue, the success of white noise is ultimately thanks to DeLillo, who put so many intimidatingly intelligent and funny lines into one book that it’s surprising that every paperback doesn’t explode right away like some kind of jack-in-the-box, bursting at the seams. Baumbach wisely conveys the novel’s words almost line by line in some places, even if the film misses some of the novel’s greatest parts (like the “most photographed barn in America” section).
However, filming DeLillo’s dialogue (which is intellectual to the point of parody, yet illuminating) is an extremely difficult task. It’s often hard to imagine real people saying the author’s great lines: “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation;” “Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone justifies their downfall;” “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons float. Do not carry out the action according to a plan.”
Somehow, almost miraculously, Baumbach and his cast manage to pull it off in spades. The filmmaker incorporates much of the original novel’s brilliant dialogue, which often contrasts sharply with Baumbach’s more naturalistic films, such as Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale, and Frances Ha. In fact, this whole movie seems like a strange passion project for Baumbach, a real anomaly in his much more grounded career, because white noise is anything but grounded.
From the meticulously choreographed sequences, grand disaster movie scenarios, CGI moments and a huge assortment of extras and practical effects, white noise is the furthest thing anyone could have expected from 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 critically acclaimed nickname “the great American novel.” However, maybe white noise resembles Baumbach’s themes more 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 in The Squid and the Whaleto the complete lack of life experience of the intellectual played by Ben Stiller in GreenbergBaumbach was a much more successful Whit Stillman – dissecting, parodying, but also embracing the very white intellectual (usually in a New York setting).
white noise also explores Baumbach’s persistent theme of honest marital problems. Filmed with his current partner, writer/director/actor Greta Gerwig, whom he met on the set of Greenberg alongside Baumbach’s then-wife Jennifer Jason Leigh, white noise is most emotionally poignant when it focuses on the beauties, mundaneness, horrors, and struggles of marriage. These aren’t the funniest or most exciting moments in the film, but along this route Baumbach seems to be forging a new path, an emotional core, in DeLillo’s chilling novel.
What makes all this work is Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, who somehow manage to adopt the same pompous formalism of DeLillo’s dialogue, but with a three-dimensional life outside the novel. What they do here is nothing short of magical, slipping into the postmodern caricatures of people, wearing their clothes for a while and literally bringing them to life. If Baumbach’s film is anything but DeLillo white noise, it’s because of these two actors, who are totally committed to characters that shouldn’t seem real at all. Somehow Driver and Gerwig, in their utmost dedication to formalistic dialogue, create real people.
White Noise may be the best movie of the year
If this all sounds abstract and confusing, it’s because white noise is also. This is a movie where people study the beauty of car accidents, where they speak poetically about Hitler and Elvis in the same Shakespearean cadence, where they debate the proper terminology to define the huge deadly cloud that disease is raining down on them.
This is not a neat film and does not fit into any genre. It’s a family comedy, and then it’s an apocalyptic nightmare; it’s a tense thriller, and then it’s a cartoonish musical. Just as DeLillo’s novel was so overflowing with ideas, Baumbach’s novel white noise is packed with cinema, exuding brilliance in the messiest of ways, jumping from one brilliant scene to another without a moment’s delay. It’s painfully unforgiving at times, never going where you’d expect it to, thus rewarding multiple viewings (preferably in theatres).
Between the ‘toxic event in the air’, the evacuations and the quarantines, many of white noise feels like the ultimate Covid movie. Exploring the before, during and after, white noise appears to be the most comprehensive film about our collective Covid-19 experience and the subsequent existential trauma most of us have had.
While the third act kind of stumbles, stumbles over the weight of its own ideas and falls into utter foolishness, this is the truly perfect Covid movie. Despite its flaws and endless contradictions, the experiment Baumbach undertook here pays off in spades, examining death and social fears better than anything in recent years. It’s crazy but dark; it is thought provoking but endlessly entertaining; it has an awesome intelligence, but it is incomprehensible. It’s perfectly imperfect and arguably the best movie of the year.
Produced by Heyday Films, NBGG Pictures and A24, white noise will hit theaters November 25 and will be available on Netflix December 30.