Noah Baumbach reportedly adapting Don DeLillo's White Noise with Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig
Aux Features Film
Don DeLillo’s White Noise is one of those classic “impossible to film” novels, a plot-light, postmodernism-heavy exploration of death, consumerism, death, quiet suburban misery, and a nice additional helping of extra and subsequent death. In its satirical story of Jack and Babette Gladney, a pioneer of “Hitler studies” at a local college and his mostly-loving wife, DeLillo’s 1985 novel wanders across a whole host of modern anxieties, spiraling ever inward toward the Gladney’s grim and omnipresent fear of their own demise. In other words: Kind of hard to turn into a movie with, say, a traditional three-act structure.
None of which appears to be daunting Noah Baumbach, or two of his regular contributors, with The Film Stage—working from a Production Weekly posting surfaced by Jason Osia on Twitter—reporting that the Marriage Story director will next be tackling an adaptation of the book with his old pal Adam Driver as Jack, and his wife and long-time creative partner, Greta Gerwig, as Babette. Per that same Production Weekly excerpt, the film is expected to go into production in June.
Of course, it took Film Twitter absolutely zero time to start getting nice and divisive about whether Baumbach is a good fit for DeLillo’s prose, which is digressive, swift moving, and often prone to intentional hyper-saturation. That kind of deliberate sensory overload feels a little at odds with Baumbach’s established style, but it’s hard to deny that it’ll be interesting to see what he, Driver, and Gerwig can make out of the meaty, twisty subject matter of DeLillo’s book.
19 Comments
Strange pairing. Love the novel and always thought a film version should be handled by somebody like Darren Aronofsky or Jonathan Glazer.
When did Greta Gerwig start looking like Melanie Griffith from 1996?
My favorite novel, literally changed my life. Not 100% sure it’s adaptable, honestly, but I’ve enjoyed Baumbach’s work before so I’ll give it a chance.
They’d be wise to keep the novel’s contemporary setting of 1985. Shifting it to the age of smartphones and such would almost surely muddy its original themes.
Wow, Greta Gerwig hasn’t done any on-camera acting in several years (20th Century Women was her last movie, and that was 2016).I assumed she was done acting was just going to direct from now.
I really didn’t like the book, and thought maybe DeLillo wasn’t my bag, but then I read and loved Libra so now I don’t know what to think.
Yeah, I was firmly not into this sort of postmodern literature, but then I got into David Foster Wallace and read all of his fiction. At that point, I was looking for more of something similar, and White Noise was recommended. But I didn’t really like it. Maybe I’ll check out Libra.
Huh. I loved White Noise. Even as someone who’d read (and gotten over) plenty of DFW, reading DeLillo felt like listening to the Velvet Underground after a lifetime of Jonathan Richman.
Underworld is also really good, but note that vampires and werewolves don’t play as big a role in it as did the movie adaptation.
Supposedly the film rights to Underworld were sold at the time it was published–this was part of the advertising materials for the book–but nothing came of it. Which isn’t surprising, because it’s so sprawling. But it might be more amenable to the limited series format.
I’m kinda surprised by that, the film rights and whatnot. Underworld is the only Delillo book I’ve ever read but I could easily see it as a multi-part series stretched out over years. I know that the first chapter is amazing, but that could easily be the first five episodes because of how dense it is.
A couple years after Underworld came out they published the first chapter separately as a novella, and I thought they were just going to make a movie of that. Still waiting. I’d love to see HBO try to do something with it.And FWIW the opening chapter is probably my favorite work of American fiction (the whole novel’s fantastic, of course.)
How would you even film this book? The majority of its appeal is in its language and themes. There is zero plot to speak of, and honestly not much in the way of character development
I guess ‘make it twee’ is *a* way to film a DeLillo novel, but I don’t think it’s a good way
Baumbach ain’t all that twee
This thing is like Hipster Endgame and I am here. For. It.
I haven’t read White Noise since college. I don’t actually know that I remember any of White Noise. But I do get the sense that maybe this isn’t the best pairing?
This would be a far different movie if it were based on a Don DiMello novel.
I’m into it. And I actually think Baumbach is a great fit for the material. From what I remember of White Noise, it’s a very uncomfortable, even claustrophobic, read. I recently watched Greenberg (my favorite Baumbach film), which has that same feeling.
The headline of this article proves that you can take four things that are individually enjoyable and combine them into a Voltron of almost-certain insufferability.
I’ll probably torrent it.