Noah Baumbach Delightfully Skewers Our Fear of Death in White Noise: Review
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Noah Baumbach Delightfully Skewers Our Fear of Death in White Noise: Review appeared first on Consequence.
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 New York Film Festival.
The Pitch: Don DeLillo’s White Noise is one of those “great American novels” long thought to be unfilmable, a scattered, acerbic takedown of late American capitalism and its incessant need to distract from the inevitability of death with movies, culture, conversation, stuff. And honestly, it’s oddly fitting that the filmmaker who’d finally tackle it would be Indie Darling Noah Baumbach himself: Like DeLillo, he too is concerned with the fits and foibles of academia, the crumbling nature of the family unit, the ways we cling to ephemera just to keep ourselves from falling apart.
And so it is with this three-part tale of the Gladney clan, a nuclear family about to go metaphorically (and in some ways literally) nuclear. There’s Jack (Adam Driver, potbellied and po-faced), a “professor of Hitler Studies” who speaks zero German but wants to make a name for himself at the Midwestern liberal arts college at which he teaches. His wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig, rocking a voluminous perm), is a frenzied mother to their four children (most of which are from previous marriages, as they’re both divorcees) and is sneaking secret white pills whose origins and nature are a mystery to her family.
And there are the kids, ranging from the proactive, pragmatic Heinrich (Sam Nivola, son of Alessandro; his sister May plays younger child Steffie) to inquisitive Denise (Raffey Cassidy), both of whom lack their parents’ penchant for distraction and anxiety.
Like most Americans, they’re a family awash in information, most of it trivia, but welcome distractions from the ever-slippery nature of reality. Jack never feels more alive than when engaging in a “lecture duel” with fellow prof Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) to convince their students that “Elvis is the new Hitler.”
Then, when an “airborne toxic event” looms over their neighborhood, he keeps minimizing the threat until they can no longer avoid evacuating, leading them to a traffic jam where they gauge how worried they should be by scanning the facial expressions of the folks in the station wagons around them. No matter how bad things get, they can sigh in relief. After all, it didn’t happen to them.
White Noise (Netflix)
There’s Always Extra: White Noise is at once quintessential Baumbach (the grainy film look, the familiar cast and idiosyncracies) and a considerable departure from his usual. Where The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story feel like odes to Robert Altman’s naturalism, White Noise‘s flights of fancy and oddball structure share DNA with Tim Burton, the Coen Brothers, and even David Byrne’s winsome True Stories. The latter is especially true in its depiction of the squeaky-clean fluorescence of the grocery store, the ultimate altar to consumption (and, therefore, immortality), capped off with a banger of a musical number over the credits, set to a new song from LCD Soundsystem.
And there’s the middle stretch, which stretches into sci-horror and disaster drama, both modes Baumbach is hardly known for; the dissonance between his typical drollness and the typical modes of those genres make this act particularly vivid. Waves of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds collide with the fractured-clan comedy of a National Lampoon’s Vacation picture, with Driver as the hapless Clark Griswold more openly staring down the barrel of a death that’s tentatively planned, but hardly scheduled.
Death Drive: But more broadly, the Gladneys’ woes are endemic of mankind’s desperate desire to distract from the moment that bell tolls for us. In the opener, Murray monologues to his class (and to us) of the supreme joy and optimism of the cinematic car crash — set to a supercut of mangled metal and mushroom-cloud peals of flame. The thrill, it’s implied, is in the distanced aesthetic appeal of the crash itself, like the same adrenaline spike we get at a good jump scare or action sequence. It’s incredible and fun, mostly because we can look at it and know it’s not us.
White Noise (Netflix)
That same principle applies to all the wild hijinks at play here, set to amusing understatement from Driver’s wearied, furrowed-brow patriarch and Gerwig’s spacey, quietly powerful Babette. In some ways, it’s when Baumbach occasionally diverts from the fun to Get Serious that the aimlessness of the script starts to detract, like in the third act’s more straight-on ruminations on our fear of death (in the form of a drug that presumably dulls it). But even then, we’re rescued by an abrasive nun (the always-great Barbra Sukowa) and the aforementioned burst of dance in the supermarket aisles by the time the film is through.
The Verdict: Adapting such droll, postmodern prose as DeLillo’s is a tall order for any filmmaker, and Baumbach largely succeeds despite some stumbles here and there. Much as he might adore the man’s work, DeLillo’s mannered, precise writing occasionally clashes with the cheeky punch of Baumbach’s typical approach. When he leans into the artifice (see: the scenes around the Gladney dinner table, overlapping dialogue as the family circles around each other in a ritualistic dance), the film fizzes even through the chaos.
But Baumbach, fittingly, doesn’t seem interested in slavishly adhering to the whims of the novel. Instead, he sees fit to fill the film with its own sense of gleeful distraction, converting it into the kind of buzzy confection the book itself warns us against. It’s Baumbach’s first real crack at a blockbuster, so of course, it’s suitably reflexive about its very nature as a balm against our existential woes. When we buy a ticket to see it (or, more realistically, toss it on around New Year’s weekend when it hits streaming), we’re indulging in the exact kind of escapism DeLillo warns us about. Why not make it as fun and full of life as possible, while recognizing it for what it is — a way to dance away from death for two-plus hours?
Where’s It Playing? White Noise comes to theaters November 25th and Netflix December 30th.
Trailer:
Noah Baumbach Delightfully Skewers Our Fear of Death in White Noise: Review
Clint Worthington
Popular Posts
Nikki Sixx Dares To Insult "Whining" Taylor Swift, Gets Called Out by Fans
Stage Crasher Takes Guitar to the Face at Black Crowes Concert
Nandi Bushell and Shane Hawkins Jam to "Everlong," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and More: Watch
Trent Reznor Quits Twitter: "We Don't Need the Arrogance of the Billionaire Class" [Updated]
Robert Fripp and Toyah Put the Squeak in Metallica's "Seek & Destroy": Watch
