Noah Baumbach goes big but falls short in White Noise
Don DeLillo's widely praised novel finally gets a film adaptation. Was it worth the wait?
Film Reviews Noah Baumbach
Writer-director Noah Baumbach excels at domestic dramas set in a milieu of neurotic artistic intellectuals, working with actors to draw pitch-perfect performances that carry both dramatic and comedic undertones. His two most recent films were about families in disarray. In The Meyerowitz Stories, an artistic family realizes the ways they have psychologically abused each other. Marriage Story was more literal than that; it’s about how a divorce gets real ugly real quick despite starting in a place of love. He previously mined the disintegration of a nuclear family by divorce in The Squid And The Whale, his first major critical and awards success.
Baumbach takes a major swerve with his latest, White Noise. First, it’s not an original screenplay but rather it’s based on Don DeLillo’s seminal 1985 novel, which was considered unfilmable for many years despite its popularity and acclaim. The film is also different in many other ways. Its ambitions are grander and its themes cover a wider perspective, grappling with a few big social issues in America. Baumbach as director also goes bigger. With apparently his biggest budget to date, he stages a few complex set pieces and directs on a larger canvas than he has before.
Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies in an unnamed Midwestern college. He shares a blended family with his wife Babbette (Gerta Gerwig), some of the kids hers, some his. This creates a charged dynamic within the family that makes their interrelationships fun to decipher. The college setting allows for a few familiar faces—Don Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André Benjamin among them—to appear as Gladney’s fellow professors. Everyone’s lives are turned upside down when a chemical spill—what is termed an “airborne toxic event”—forces them to flee their small town. The Gladneys fall into an existential crisis exasperated by the real danger that’s all around them.
Ironically, despite trying to go a different way with White Noise, what works best are the elements where Baumbach has previously proven himself. His perceptive work with the actors wrings pathos from within a fractured family, the kind of material Driver and Gerwig excel at by now. This is Driver’s fifth collaboration with Baumbach and Gerwig’s third (though it’s worth noting she’s his life partner offscreen). Familiarity in both cases leads to stellar work, both together and separately. Both look different here too, with girth added to Driver’s midsection and Gerwig given ludicrously big hair. Driver adapts to the film’s heightened style and gives a performance of deft intelligence and physical gestures. At first Gerwig looks to be giving a familiar performance with the same easy charm and comedic physicality as her Frances Ha tour de force. Yet once Babbette’s turmoil and insecurities are revealed, Gerwig’s performance comes through as dexterous, full of both heart and laughs. Babette’s confession of a marital indiscretion is a particular triumph.
May Nivola, Sam Nivola, and especially Raffey Cassidy as the three older Gladney kids are also adeptly attuned to the film’s unnatural rhythms. Playing against Driver and Gerwig, they make the many family discussion scenes flow easily, giving the film its best moments. However, as the heightened stylized dialogue starts to lose its spiciness, they can only take it so far. The film’s themes exist as just discussion points, never resonating in real, tangible ways. The characters speak incessantly about being afraid of death yet the danger remains purely academic, never once coming through as something that might befall one of them. The toxic event and the chaos of misinformation everyone’s plunged into jolts the film along for a bit, if only because we are all still reeling from a similar situation in our ongoing pandemic. More successful is this story taking on the pitfalls of American consumerism, if only because it leads to one of the most exuberant sequences in any movie this year. You haven’t lived until you see the whole cast—but particularly Benjamin—shimmy down to LCD Soundsystem’s “New Body Rhumba,” a song written specifically for the movie.
It’s always admirable when a filmmaker makes a bolder choice and expands their horizon. For Baumbach, such a venture leads to a familiar place; the nuances of family strife remain his artistic sweet spot. Marrying his vision with DeLillo’s proves an uneasy alliance. Unlike the Gladneys who remain together, Baumbach and DeLillo should follow in the footsteps of the couple in Marriage Story: The love might still be there, but the union is bad for both of them.
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How am I supposed enjoy cinema in a world where cruelties like this exist? https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/evil-scots-artist-who-forced-28566602
And why is Keanu Reeves still allowed to roam the planet so freely?!
because he is widely loved and respected and regarded as God in earthly form.
To remind Matthew Perry what a piece of shit he is.
One of my coworkers is in her early 50s and has various Friends memorabilia around her workspace, so I was unsurprised to hear that she bought Matthew Perry’s memoir as an audiobook for her commute. I was a little surprised, though, at the degree of abject loathing the book triggered in her. Her capsule review was, “He’s a misogynistic asshole who thinks he’s clever.”
The Gladneys fall into an existential crisis exasperated by the real danger that’s all around them. Do you mean exacerbated rather than exasperated?
Well I mean…when I’m in an existential crisis, wondering why I’m here and whatnot, I often find myself annoyed by the various armed robberies and attempted murders that often occur in my vicinity. So it works.
exasperated- the A.V. Club
Nope, exasporate means exacerbate now. Also, the past-temse form of “lead” is now spelled L-E-D.
The past-tense form of lead (pronounced “leed”) has always been led. Lead (pronounced “led”) is an element, not the past-tense form of anything.
But the past tense form of “lead” really is spelled led…
Holy fuck, they got to me too. Oh god…
Three days, and AV Club still hasn’t made a correction.
I mean TWO days. Ironbic I wood mayk a missteak, ryte?
Considering the fact that Greta Gerwig’s name is misspelled as “Gerta” in the same paragraph, I’m leaning typo.
EDIT: Looks like there is an obsolete usage of exasperate that means “to aggravate” so maybe that’s the intended use here? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/exasperate
no way it wasn’t gonna be a mess but i have to applaud baumbach for being able to extract 100+ million dollars from netflix to make this.
The book was very funny, was my takeaway. I’m kind of a shallow reader. Particularly the dialog between the parents and their “postmodern” children, as the book jacket describes them. Sounds like the movie is pretty faithful in that regard.
years later I remember only a couple of things from the book: the plot points that move the story forward in its second and third part, the daughter who loved to let the bread burn in the toaster and the neighbourhood who loved to see the Los Angeles sunsets as the pollution made them more beautiful.
I didn’t finish it.Was hoping somebody would say, “So it’s somewhat of a prototype for The Simpsons?” then someone else would be like “Yes” and/or “No.” Between the postmodern children and the funky color scheme, kinda seems like a yes.
I remember reading White Noise because it seemed up there with Infinite Jest on the list of “Books College-Educated Cis White Guys Should Read Or At Least Have On Their Bookshelf.” Which, is basically Baumbach’s whole boring schtick, so I guess he’s the right guy to adapt this.
Thanks for sharing. Really interesting thought.
“A professor of Hitler studies” ??
You mean a History professor who specializes in Hitler? I mean, it’s not like Universities have programs in “Hitler Studies” side-by-side with Black Studies or Women’s Studies.
No, really, a professor of Hitler Studies. He invents the first university department of Hitler Studies. This is postmodern lit, not reality.
In the Universe of the book/movie, they do.
Wait until you meet his colleague professor who specializes in Elvis Presley
In 1985 Delillo was being critical of how Universities were becoming redundant to society. The idea of a “Professor of Hitler Studies” instead of saying a history professor, is indicitating that there are uncessary specialisations and ridiculous debates in the University now (that is 1985). The University and academic should be connected with the culture of the day guiding decision making in public discourse, but instead, in order to justify a wage in the newly corporatsed University of the 80’s academics were incentivised to carve out a niche. This also leads to the hollowing out of how studetns are taught: No longer did universities provide an all encompassing education for an individual, but dubious piecemeal specialisation. 40 years later we can see where the destruction of the University has lead. Hope the movie is good.
It’s not a typo. That’s in the book. I always assumed it was intended be a commentary, but on what (and to what end), I’ve never been able to discern.
That trailer is extremely obnoxious.
thats kind of adam driver’s preferred script to work with, and Baumbach too.
Sounds interesting. But since it’s exclusive to Netflix I won’t see it for a long time.
ADAM DRIVER TO STAR IN PRETENTIOUS WHITE PEOPLE MOVIE
This is Driver’s fifth collaboration with Baumbach and Gerwig’s third (though it’s worth noting she’s his life partner offscreen).Excuse me, Gerwig’s fourth collaboration with Baumbach I’ll have you know. Is Mistress America nothing to you??
Hey, new LCD Soundsystem song. That’s my takeaway.
“Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies in an unnamed Midwestern college.”The college is not unnamed. It is named College-on-the Hill. This review is rife with errors.
When adapting a book, it’s always a challenge to decide what
gets said and what doesn’t. Film allows a writer to say as much with silence as
he can with words. White Noise really
struggles with this, particularly in the first act. I couldn’t tell if the rapid-fire
dialogue was meaningful or just an homage to the story’s title. The story has some interesting ideas. But the more I
marinated in it, the more I realized its commentary on death is mostly the sort
of pseudointellectual schlock chain smoking college students wax poetic about
at 3am on the steps of their dorm, all wrapped up in the Kodacrhome aesthetic of today: the 1980s. (side note: from The
Goldbergs to Stranger Things, no
director has managed to capture exactly our orange the ‘80s really were. Is Three’s Company not streaming anywhere?)
White Noise has some points to make about consumerism, but they weren’t particularly novel or
poignant. It reads like a speech by Greta Thunberg: apt and necessary, but not an
“ah ha” revelation Baumbach or DeLillo seem to think it is. In fact, these are
all points Lisa Simpson has been hammering home for the last three decades.
In the end, it ultimately fails to even make any long
lasting point about consumerism. Instead of using the grocery store and station
wagon to expose the pitfalls of consumerism; they make the audience nostalgic for
long forgotten cereal brands and a Caprice Classic capable of tailing an off
roader into the woods.
All of these stylistic distractions pull us out of a story
we’re supposed to internalize. I wonder, if Jack had been cast as someone
conventionally attractive and Babbette been played by a young Sally Field, both
against the tobacco stained backdrop of an accurate 1980s, would these points
resonate better, or would the audience see White
Noise as the poorly adapted film it actually is.
White Noise made those points well before Lisa Simpson.
Fair point. I hadn’t considered that the book was released
in 1985. But now that I think about it, Lisa Simpson was ranting about Left
wing causes on The Tracey Ullman Show since
1987 and Matt Groening started writing “Life in Hell” in the late ‘70s. Both he
and DeLillo had similar takes on Reagan Era consumerism and are likely fans of
one another. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine the Simpsons being the Gladney’s
lowbrow neighbors.
lol You are such an arrogant jagoff.