movie reviews for white noise

White Noise

Death unites us all. And societies are shaped by not just the dread of that inevitable outcome but the common manners in which we push those existential thoughts aside. Consumerism, conspiracy theories, and collective trauma collide in Noah Baumbach’s daring adaptation of a novel that may have been published in the mid-’80s but undeniably speaks to the issues that continue to dominate our culture in the 2020s. A story of a family unmoored from their already fragile existence by an airborne toxic event has relevance to the COVID era that author Don DeLillo couldn’t have imagined specifically. Yet, the source material here is designed to speak to a larger sense of trauma and fear—elements that will never go away as long as that pesky Grim Reaper remains in our lives. Baumbach’s adaptation of “White Noise” unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there’s more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn’t necessarily consider matches. Life is full of surprises, right?

“White Noise” opens with a professor named Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) speaking of the comfort of car crashes on film. Like every choice in this script, it’s not an accident. Siskind speaks of the simplicity of the car crash, noting how it cuts through character and plotting to something that’s easily understood and relatable. It foreshadows the mid-section of a film that will play essentially like a disaster movie, asking viewers to imagine what they would do if stuck in the same situation. And it’s a set-up for another fascinating aspect of “White Noise”—a commentary on crowd catharsis. We are at peace when we see others doing the same thing we are doing, whether it’s watching a car crash in a movie, attending an Elvis concert, or buying things we don’t need at an A&P grocery store.

Someone who keenly understands groupthink is Professor Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), one of the world experts on Hitler Studies, even though he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t speak German. The first act—and the film is divided into three parts on-screen—could be called a satire of academia as Gladney, Siskind, and their colleague use big words to help get a grip on big problems. Jack and his wife Babbette ( Greta Gerwig ) have a blended family that includes the anxiety-prone Denise ( Raffey Cassidy ), problem-solving Heinrich ( Sam Nivola ), and two more children. Babbette has forgotten things lately, and Denise notices a new prescription bottle for a drug called Dylar. This is an everyday American family—going through the motions of life as they try to push away the issues that have dogged philosophers for eons, like the meaning of it all and how to stop thinking about when it ends. In one of the best early scenes, a comment about how happy they are leads Babbette and Jack into a conversation about who should die first. 

While death is a concern in the first act of “White Noise,” it becomes more tactile in the second act, titled “The Airborne Toxic Event.” A train crash at the edge of town sends chemicals flying into the sky, and everyone in the Gladney family except Jack panics. As he tries to defuse the situation, Denise becomes convinced that she’s sick already, and Henrich obsessively listens to news reports. Before long, they’re on the road in a mass evacuation, and one of Baumbach’s most impressive technical achievements unfolds, capturing a family on the run from the unknown.

Without spoiling the final act completely, it re-centers the Gladneys back at home, but with death a much more present reality in Jack’s mind. Unfortunately, as the intensity rises, “White Noise” loses some of its impact, especially in a few talky scenes near the end that betray the tone of the first half. Yes, the film always deals with “serious” subjects, but it gets rocky when they take center stage, and the tone struggles to merge satire and marital drama. DeLillo’s book was notoriously called “unfilmable” for decades, and it feels like this last act is where that’s most apparent.

Thankfully, Baumbach has two of his most reliable collaborators to keep it from going off the rails. Driver is, once again, excellent here, crafting a performance that is often very funny without relying on broad character beats. There’s a version of this character that’s pitched to eleven—the awkward academic forced into trying to keep his family alive despite his inferior skill set—but Driver gives a performance that’s often very subtle even as everything around him is going broad. Gerwig is a little oddly mannered early in the film, but that makes sense for a character who becomes somewhat unmoored before the air around her becomes toxic.

To unpack this epic of existential dread, Baumbach has assembled a team that deserves mention. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (“ Vox Lux “) finds the right balance between realism and parody in his camera work, giving much of the film an exaggerated look amplified by Jess Gonchor’s ace production design. The A&P here, with its bright colors and shelves of identical items, is not quite reality, but it’s close enough to make its point, and the chaotic sequences of panic in the mid-section have the energy of a CGI blockbuster. Finally, Danny Elfman’s score is one of the best of the year, connecting the three tonally different sections.

What does it all mean? Why do we take pills, buy junk, and watch car crashes to escape our fears? The phenomenal A&P dance sequence that ends “White Noise” lands a key theme in a fascinating way—we may all just be buying colorful stuff we don’t need to distract ourselves from reality, but let’s at least try to have fun while we’re doing it.

In limited theatrical release now. On Netflix on December 30 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Adam Driver as Jack Gladney
• Greta Gerwig as Babbette
• Raffey Cassidy as Denise
• Sam Nivola as Heinrich
• May Nivola as Steffie
• Don Cheadle as Murray Siskind
• Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards
• André 3000 as Elliot Lasher
• Lars Eidinger as Arlo Shell
• Danny Elfman

Writer (based on the book by)

• Don DeLillo

Cinematographer

• Lol Crawley
• Matthew Hannam
• Noah Baumbach

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes

In this prophetic/topical/overly-spelled-out fable, Adam Driver, as an entitled professor, and Greta Gerwig, as his haunted pill-popping wife, lead a college-town clan on a collision course with disaster.

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Owen Gleiberman

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In the early scenes, one recognizes, and responds with jittery pleasure, to the Baumbach touch. “White Noise” is set in a cozy leafy college town, which has grown up around a small liberal-arts school called The-College-on-the-Hill, and that makes the movie an ideal vehicle for the kind of high-spirited disputatious chatter that Baumbach is a wizard at. The central character, Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), teaches at the college, where he has pioneered an entire discipline devoted to Hitler Studies — which sounds like a Woody Allen joke, except that the film, like Jack, takes it all quite seriously. Jack isn’t just teaching about Hitler; he’s the excavator of the dictator’s soul, a rhapsodist of fascism.

Jack’s wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), has hair that looks like an ’80s perm (though in fact it’s natural) as well as an attitude that’s spiky enough to balance his exultant narcissism, and she pops mysterious pharmaceutical pills on the sly. They’ve each been married three times before, and between them they’ve got a reasonably well-adjusted brood of broken-home children: the sharp teenager Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and her sweet younger sister Steffie (May Nivola), who are Babette’s daughters, the chip-off-the-old-block brilliant talker Heinrich (Sam Nivola), who is Jack’s son, and a young son who is both of theirs. They’re like the Brady Bunch with a touch of the Sopranos, and Baumbach, for a while, keeps the family dialogue humming.

He also introduces us to Jack’s academic colleagues, who are treated as gently cracked without being mocked, notably Murray (Don Cheadle), who is some sort of American Studies professor with a profound take on the cheesiest dimensions of American society. He thinks that supermarkets are a deep form of nirvana, and the film opens with his lecture, illustrated by a dazzling montage of film clips, on the meaning of the car crash in Hollywood cinema, which he views as a pure expression of joy (and genius). In a way, this sets the tone for all that follows. It lets us know that “White Noise” is going to be, on some level, about violence and catastrophe, and that it’s going to regard those things with a funny and ironic sidelong eye.

The first clue that we’re watching more than just an observational comedy about a nutty professor and his fractured family comes when a man driving a truck full of toxic chemicals crashes into a train, and the accident produces a massive black chemical cloud that hovers in the distance, edging inexorably toward the town. Will it move in and poison everyone? As Jack and his family pile into their Chevy station wagon, evacuating in a miles-long traffic pile-up as portentous as the one in Godard’s “Weekend,” the film, just like that, becomes a metaphorical disaster movie about fear, conspiracy, and the toxicity of consumer products.

Those pills Babette pops turns out to be harbingers of the new world. They’re not uppers — they are, rather, mood stabilizers meant to quell her fear of death. Jack and Babette are both obsessed with death (their idea of screwball chatter is discussing which of the two of them is going to die first), and when Jack, during that toxic-cloud escape, steps out of the car for two minutes to fill the gas tank, he learns he may have gotten a lethal dose of chemicals. Or given how nuts the doctors in this film sound, is that diagnosis just another conspiracy?

These are heavy questions, and “White Noise,” on the page, achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, “White Noise” announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them. Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, “White Noise” has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news. How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of “New Body Rhumba” by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality “White Noise” could have used more of.  

Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins.

• Production: A Netflix release of an NBGG Pictures, Heyday Films production, in association with A24. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman, Uri Singer. Executive producers: Brian Bell, Leslie Converse.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera: Lol Crawley. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Danny Elfman.
• With: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Niviola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin, Sam Gold, Carlos Jacott, Lars Eidinger, Francis Jue, Barbara Sukowa.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Toxic Events, Airborne and Domestic

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel is a campus comedy, a domestic drama and an allegory of contemporary American life.

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By A.O. Scott

Late in “White Noise,” after the ecological disaster known as the “airborne toxic event,” on the heels of a professional triumph, and in the throes of marital woe, Jack and Babette engage in a discussion of religion with an acerbic German nun. Instead of piety, she offers a pragmatic, borderline cynical view of how faith operates. If she and her colleagues “did not pretend to believe these things,” she says — referring to “old beliefs” in stuff like heaven and hell — “the world would collapse.”

The nun, played by the formidable Barbara Sukowa, has been carefully airlifted from the pages of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel into Noah Baumbach’s new film. So have Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who head up a rambunctious blended family in a Midwestern college town. Jack, known in academia by the decorative initials J.A.K., is the founder of the college’s department of Hitler Studies. Babette teaches life skills to the elderly and infirm.

Back to Sister Hermann Marie: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else in the world takes seriously,” she says. This may or may not be true of nuns, but it can often feel glumly applicable to writers and filmmakers, especially those who try to chart an independent course. Somebody has to care about art and literature. With respect to DeLillo, Baumbach is very much a believer. His “White Noise” is a credible adaptation and a notably faithful one — what an earlier Baumbach character might call the filet of DeLillo’s bristling, gristly book. Very little has been added, and what’s been taken out will be missed only by fanatics. (A warning and maybe a spoiler for DeLillo-heads: The most photographed barn in America is nowhere to be seen.)

The challenges inherent in the project are bravely faced and honorably met. The novel straddles domestic realism and speculative satire. It’s a campus comedy stapled to a family drama and tied up with a ribbon of allegory. Its contemporary topics — no less relevant now than in the ’80s — include intellectual fashion, pharmacological folly, environmental destruction and rampant consumerism. These collide with eternal themes: envy, love, the fear of death.

Baumbach’s reverence for the material is evident from the trompe l’oeil opening sequence — footage of car crashes from old movies, accompanying a lecture by a professor of popular culture — through the end credits, which turn DeLillo’s vision of supermarket heaven into a bouncy LCD Soundsystem music video. Driver, paunchy and swaybacked, is the very model of a modern middle-aged professor, his intellectual curiosity muffled by a certain complacency. He’s a happy man whose vocation is horror.

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

White Noise

Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of h... Read all Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world.

• Noah Baumbach
• Don DeLillo
• Adam Driver
• Greta Gerwig
• Don Cheadle
• 469 User reviews
• 206 Critic reviews
• 66 Metascore
• 3 wins & 24 nominations

Top cast 99+

• College on the Hill
• (as Wickham Bermingham)

• (as Matthew Williams)

• Student in Jack's Class
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia This is Noah Baumbach 's first time writing and directing a book-to-screen adaptation, and only his second adaptation after co-writing the screenplay for Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) .
• Goofs In the opening scene, many vehicles featured in Murray's crash sequence reel are from the 1990s and 2000s, whereas White Noise takes place in the 1980s.

Jack : But out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope.

• Crazy credits There is a scene at the end where the characters dance in a supermarket. As the credits start to roll, this sequence is played partially in reverse as the music continues to play normally.
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: This Movie Saved My Life (and the one's that almost ruined it): Best and Worst of 2022 (2023)
• Soundtracks Lincoln Portrait Written by Aaron Copland

User reviews 469

• Dec 29, 2022
• How long is White Noise? Powered by Alexa
• December 30, 2022 (United States)
• United States
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• Official Netflix
• ضوضاء بيضاء
• Wellington, Ohio, USA (Storefronts are built out and set up for July filming)
• BB Film Productions
• Heyday Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $145,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 2 hours 16 minutes

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Review: ‘White Noise’ puts a loud, brash and enjoyable spin on a Don DeLillo classic

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“White Noise,” Noah Baumbach’s jittery and inventive adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, begins with what you might call a love letter to cinema. We’ve had a lot of those recently , but this one — a college lecture on car crashes in American movies — is appreciably sharper, funnier and more specific than most. As his students watch a montage of fiery vehicular explosions, professor Murray Jay Siskind (a wonderful Don Cheadle) implores them to look past the violence and see the spirit of optimism and enterprise pulsing underneath: “There’s a constant upgrading of tools, skills, a meeting of challenges,” he marvels. “The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something loud and fiery, head-on.”

Baumbach, a specialist in complicated human passions, appears to have taken the professor’s enthusiasm to heart. Before long, he’ll stage his own elemental pileup: An oil tanker truck T-bones a freight train, sending its chemical cargo flying every which way and igniting a conflagration that belches deadly black smoke into the sky. There’s nothing optimistic about what happens next, but the moment of collision is executed with undeniable gusto; Baumbach does, for a moment, seem like the proverbial kid playing with a big honkin’ train set. Here and elsewhere in “White Noise,” he happily applies himself to the upgrading of tools and skills, and to the meeting of the formidable, some would say foolhardy, challenge before him.

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DeLillo’s novel — bursting with theories both prescient and otherwise about consumerism, addiction, environmental decay, (mis)information overload and the universal if also uniquely American fear of death — has long been deemed unfilmable, as novels of ideas are reflexively assumed to be. In this case, there’s not only the danger of mishandling the author’s satirical targets or the icy precision of his latex-glove sentences, but also the risk of approximating them too closely, of locking them away in a remote, often fondly nostalgized ’80s moment and draining them of their corrosive, unsettling power.

Baumbach does not quite surmount this obstacle; an eerie climax and one pretty good jump scare aside, the terror here belongs more to the characters and their era than it does to us and ours. But his affection for the novel produces its own warm, countervailing energy. Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

Here, in the domestically contented but existentially paranoid flesh, are Jack Gladney (Adam Driver, paunchy) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig, curly), raising four kids, three from past marriages, in a college town whose heart is its campus and whose soul is its supermarket. Lol Crawley’s grainy-textured widescreen images (shot on 35-millimeter anamorphic film) steer us through the messy living spaces and immaculate grocery aisles of a postmodern “Brady Bunch,” where boxes of Tide and cans of Coca-Cola gleam out at us with an almost otherworldly sheen. (Jess Gonchor’s production design nails the ’80s vibe and branding perfectly.)

We also spend some time with Jack’s professor colleagues (they include a curt Jodie Turner-Smith and a delightful André Benjamin) as they hold intellectual court, never more mesmerizingly than when Jack and Murray deliver a dual lecture comparing and contrasting the early lives of Hitler and Elvis. Jack is one of the country’s leading professors of Hitler studies, which makes his limited grasp of German his most embarrassing secret, at least initially. (Here it may be worth noting the presence of at least two marvelous German actors, Lars Eidinger and the veteran Barbara Sukowa, both perfectly cast in crucial roles.)

Babette, who teaches posture classes for the elderly, is hiding her own deep, dark secret, namely the pills she keeps popping when she thinks no one’s looking. But except for their adorable toddler, Wilder (played by Dean and Henry Moore), their kids notice everything and delight in challenging parental authority, especially Babette’s stubborn, concerned daughter Denise (a terrific Raffey Cassidy) and Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), a fount of pessimistic data who’s the first one to notice that deadly black cloud headed their way.

Until that point, “White Noise” has found a pleasurable sweet spot between the Baumbachian and the DeLillo-esque. Much of the tetchy, disorienting domestic banter, with its volleys of data and non-sequitur factoids, comes straight from the novel, even as the disorienting screwball rhythms (the editing is by Matthew Hannam) and the overlapping lines of dialogue hark back to the director’s earlier comedies like “The Meyerowitz Stories” and “Mistress America.” But once its famous “airborne toxic event” is set in motion and the entire town is forced to evacuate, the movie, like Danny Elfman’s wondrously nimble score, kicks into overdrive. Soon Jack, Babette and the kids are on the run in their station wagon, with death looming in the rearview mirror and some vintage Spielberg riffs on the road ahead.

The pitch-perfect mimicry of ’80s action-thriller clichés — just count how many garbage cans get knocked over by cars screeching in reverse — is something only a contemporary retooling of a retro story could have pulled off. That knowing playfulness is part of the movie’s charm; so is the spectacle of Baumbach, a master of intimate, small-scaled comedy, embracing the conventions of the big-budget apocalyptic thriller, complete with lethal lightning storms, an unexpected river cruise and endless, chaotic traffic jams.

But Baumbach doesn’t stop there. He may faithfully adhere to the novel’s three-act structure (the rhythm of its many short, self-contained chapters proves more elusive), but his shrewdest and most suitably postmodern gesture is to offer up a highly elastic palimpsest of allusions, genres and styles. Primarily a domestic-romantic drama and a satire of academia before it becomes a full-blown disaster epic, “White Noise” also morphs, in its climactic stretch, into a seedy motel-room noir, a Monty Python sketch and, supremely, an LCD Soundsystem dance musical. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

This stylistic verve can sometimes feel liberating, an inspired rejoinder to the clinical perfection of DeLillo’s prose. And sometimes it can feel like too much, to the point of becoming absorbed and lost within the story’s white-noise barrage: the marketing slogans, the academic bull sessions, the pointless government directives when all hell breaks loose. Maybe that’s the point. For DeLillo purists and scholars, surely the movie’s least forgiving audience, Baumbach’s attempts at narrative compression will seem especially glaring. He has streamlined the book’s cast — gone is Babette’s gun-supplying dad — and trimmed or removed some of its choicest aphorisms. In trying to both preserve and open up a much-canonized text, he sometimes falls into an all-too-familiar adaptive compromise.

Some of Jack’s mordant first-person insights on the page have been reassigned to other characters on the screen, a shift for which Driver’s performance compensates to no small degree. He’s entirely believable as the outwardly impressive but inwardly insecure academic, desperate to maintain a sunny outlook even under fast-darkening skies. Jack may be the most ridiculous of the glaringly imperfect spouses Driver has played recently (in “Annette” and “Marriage Story”), and also the most redeemable. Gerwig is no less movingly misguided as Babette, who — like her husband, but through more extreme measures — tries to sublimate fears, both rational and irrational, of impending doom.

“We are fragile characters surrounded by hostile facts,” Babette notes, tweaking without materially changing a sentiment from the novel. The absurdity of these characters is inseparable from their pathos, and the director’s obvious affection for them, and for his two lead actors, makes them more affecting still. The warmth of feeling that suffuses the movie’s final moments may not be the most faithful salute to DeLillo, but it is very much the point of this “White Noise.”

‘White Noise’

In English and German with English subtitles Rated: R, for brief violence and language Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles, and Bay Theater, Pacific Palisades; starts streaming Dec. 30 on Netflix

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‘white noise’ review: adam driver and noah baumbach take a bold stab but don delillo’s novel still seems unfilmable.

Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle also star in Netflix's Venice opener, an absurdist apocalyptic vision of one family grappling with the specter of disaster and death in a world spinning off its axis.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Adam sandler celebrates 'happy gilmore 2' starting production: "we've only just begun", netflix snags aaron rodgers doc amid flurry of sports series pickups, white noise.

That perception doesn’t change a lot with this valiant Netflix adaptation. It feels like the streaming service was so high on the deserved critical acclaim for Baumbach’s Marriage Story that they gave him carte blanche and a mountain of cash to make his passion project, a property that had defeated more than one filmmaker in development hell before him.

This is Baumbach’s third feature for Netflix, and its greatest strength recalls the first of those, The Meyerowitz Stories — the affectionate observation of a rambunctious family who tend to talk all at once, often at cross-purposes.

Here it’s the blended family of Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) and his wife Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), each of them on their fourth marriage and raising the children of previous unions — Jack’s analytically inclined teenage son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and sensitive younger daughter Steffie (May Nivola); and Babette’s hard-nosed 11-year-old Denise (Raffey Cassidy), vigilantly monitoring her mother’s neurotic behavior; as well as the 6-year-old son they had together, Wilder (played by twins Henry and Dean Moore).

A gaggle of caustically opinionated professors — including characters played by Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin and New York theater director Sam Gold — provides texture. The most substantially fleshed out of them is Murray Sisskind (a wonderful intellectual caricature from Don Cheadle ), who teaches a course in pop-cultural iconography that, right off the bat, will make you want to enroll.

Murray opens the film with a class on the car crash in Hollywood movies, rhapsodizing about the “secular optimism and self-celebration” delivered in big-screen auto collisions, each one more spectacular than the last. He enthuses over footage of mangled metal and flaming wreckage, admiring a carefree, lighthearted quality that foreign movies could never approach. One of the standout set-pieces of this enjoyable early section is an impromptu joint lecture in which Jack lends his campus rock-star mystique to Murray’s class as they parallel the lives of two mythic figures, Hitler and Elvis Presley, respectively.  

At home, Jack and Babette both fret about being the first to die, left to face the abyss alone. Death is a hot topic in the ramshackle house, with the kids rushing to the TV to watch news coverage of a plane crash.

So far so good. It’s when Baumbach’s script shifts from wry situational observation into more concrete plot incident that the material starts showing its age and the literary roots become more cumbersome.

There are fun touches, like science geek Heinrich gaining social confidence as he regales the crowd of evacuees at a camp with his detailed insights. But the film overall becomes steadily less involving — and more grating in its quirks — as it explores both the ecological and emotional fallout of the chemical spill.

The focus starts to seem pulled in too many directions, including the proliferation of conspiracy theories; the family’s concern over secretive Babette’s memory lapses due to an experimental anxiety drug called Dylar; the role of a shadow figure known as Mr. Gray (Lars Eidinger); and Murray planting the idea in Jack’s head that perhaps he can overcome his own fear of death by taking someone else’s life.

The power of violence and terror to reunite families in troubled times still seems a ripe notion for satire, as does the American dependence on pharmaceuticals for comfort and the long reach of eco-messes in our lives. But the movie’s manic machinations become less, not more, connected to any tangible contemporary reality, making it play like a period piece trapped in amber. Even rollicking sequences like Jack and brood speeding away from danger in the family station wagon, temporarily set adrift on a river, don’t build much comic momentum.

As the pilot for all this mayhem, Driver certainly commits; he makes amusing use of his outsize physical presence by swooping around the College-on-the-Hill campus wearing his academic gown like a vampire’s cape.

Gerwig, sporting a mop of tight curls that Murray describes as “important hair,” fades away much like her character, who spends stretches of the movie staring out a window in sweats, lost in numbed anxiety. The kids remain more captivating, with Sam and May Nivola (the children of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer) making lively impressions, while Cassidy is an appealingly bossy presence, in many ways the most responsible figure in the house.

“We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts,” says Murray late in the action, articulating a thesis about learning to shut out that world, however temporarily, that coheres only intermittently in the film. More apropos is Jack’s comment near the start: “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can.” Only in the closing supermarket dance explosion does that exhortation become truly infectious. Despite the movie’s inconsistency, at least it sends you out on a high.

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White Noise review: Noah Baumbach wrestles with a brilliant, impossible novel

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig go deep into a 1980s fever dream in the director's intriguing but uneven adaptation.

Postmodernism is a hell of a drug. In the opening chapter of Don Delillo's classic 1985 novel White Noise , a college professor named Jack Gladney relays the ordinary details of his world: a wife, four children, the daily campus grind. He speaks of station wagons and airport Marriotts, corduroyed coworkers and trips to the grocery store. And yet nearly every line wriggles with surreal comedy, panicky and elastic and preposterously alive. For several decades, various Hollywood luminaries tried and failed to take it on; Noah Baumbach is the first to succeed, and his adaptation, which had its North American premiere last night at the New York Film Festival before it lands on Netflix this December, feels like a film made with deep respect and affection for its source material. But it also seems, in nearly every scene, like he's dancing about architecture, trying to wrest something from the strange magic of those pages that refuses to be translated to the screen.

It helps that he has two of his favorite collaborators to help carry the load: Adam Driver , whom he's now worked with five times, is the garrulous, Buddha-bellied Jack, and Greta Gerwig , another regular coconspirator and also Baumbach's partner in life, is Jack's wife Babette, a suburban goddess in a blonde spiral perm. It's the fourth marriage for them both and soft middle-age is settling in, though they're still almost unfailingly hot for each other in and out of the bedroom. There are also three children from previous unions — imperious teen Denise (Raffey Cassidy), along with Heinrich and Steffie (real siblings Sam and May Nivola) — and one small product of their own, a beaming cherub named Wilder. Life in the Gladney house carries on in a state of messy domestic bliss, tempered with the usual petty irritations and complaints, until the day a highly flammable tankard collides with a train outside of town, and a noxious black plume appears on the horizon.

Soon the plume has been upgraded to something officials are calling an Airborne Toxic Event, though semantics don't really explain what that means for all the distraught humans on the ground. Ordered to evacuate, they set out for temporary shelter, one more freaked-out family in a tangle of standstill traffic and hazmat tents. But what are the little white pills that Babette keeps surreptitiously popping, insisting it's just air or cherry LifeSavers when she's pressed? If you're familiar with the book, you may have some recall of what follows, though Noise is hardly linear in any traditional sense of plot or pacing.

Baumbach lays out numerous setpieces — at the college where Jack teaches Hitler Studies; in the stacked, gleaming aisles of the local A&P; even an unscheduled car ride down a river — with high auteur style, steeped in the shiny consumerism and thrumming low-grade paranoia of peak-'80s America. He draws great, zesty performances from his supporting cast, including Don Cheadle as a garrulous fellow professor, and the German actress Barbara Sukowa as an ornery apostate nun. (Nobody casts extras like him, too; they have faces ). Driver brings something both salty and haunted to Jack, and Gerwig feels like a beating heart, alive to every sunburst and storm cloud of her emotional weather.

But they all have to reckon with dialogue whose satirical fizz and deadpan rhythms don't often translate to anything resembling real life, and a book whose brilliance stubbornly resists any other medium but itself. Compared to the tender groundedness of Baumbach's finest films, like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story , the scampering leaps and feints of his script here come off as deliberately arch, even artificial. The movie's final scene, though, without spoiling too much, is also easily its best: a bravura grocery-store dance sequence anachronistically soundtracked by the Brooklyn art-pop band LCD Soundsystem that recalls everything from Jacques Demy's French New Wave classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to the 2003 Japanese marvel The Blind Swordsman . It's nothing like the ending of the novel, and maybe that's why it's so good: a moment of pure unfettered inspiration, joyful in its own noise. Grade: B–

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‘White Noise’: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s American Nightmare

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

What exactly is Noah Baumbach up to in White Noise ? The movie, which received a very limited theatrical release ahead of premiering December 30 on Netflix , is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s canonical postmodern novel from 1985. It’s been an intriguing prospect since it was announced because the celebrated writer/director would, at face value, seem to be a mismatch for the material. Baumbach’s milieu has tended to belong less to the eerily affected, consumerist crisis-world of DeLillo’s book than to the world of people who’d feel an obligation to have read that book. White Noise makes more sense as a book you can expect to see on Baumbach characters’ shelves.

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Like Marriage Story , White Noise stars Adam Driver . He plays Professor Jack Gladney, a scholar of Nazi Studies who cannot speak German. (He’s working on it.) He is, among other things, a man with Hitler on the mind, sharing with that monster a penchant for public performance, for taking his audience to church, in his own way. The robe, the Dr. Strangelove glasses: he’s as much an actor as a scholar. He’s also a family man. His wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), is a bubbly woman with a bubbly name, crinkle-curled half to death, with enough smarts to keep up with Jack and enough of a handle on reality to seem comparatively normal. Babette has been having memory problems. The Gladneys’ too-clever quartet of kids have noticed Babette sneaking off to take a mysterious drug named Dylar (evoking the synthetic material Mylar) that may either be the solution or the cause of those problems — it’s hard to say. They make for a funny little family unit, the Gladneys, living well in a professor’s house, in a college town, volleying back and forth through concerns both hyper-rational and completely normal, living lives flooded with brand-name products that Baumbach’s 35mm anamorphic frames take care to arrange, notice and announce as loudly and often as possible.

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Baumbach wiggles his way into that tension by rendering White Noise into a mashup of popular American Eighties styles, both high and low: the popcorny ensemble adventure, the sitcom, the Reagan-era adult prestige drama. He’s faithful enough to the shape and feel of those styles for us to notice not only when he moves between them, but for us to recognize that we, too, are a step removed from reality. We aren’t watching a simple, nostalgic tribute to the Eighties. We’re watching a movie that’s just off-center enough, just willing enough to announce itself as an approximation, that the era feels like a distant but easily consumed media memory. Even the disastrous toxic cloud that confronts this family feels referential. It’s sort of beautiful: astonishingly gloomy, a roiling gray mess with pink-purple shocks of lightning stuttering through it. We’re watching a movie called White Noise . But that cloud is straight out of Ghostbusters . 

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Baumbach overreaches in White Noise . The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured. Even a captivating monologue-confession by Gerwig, which anchors the dreary latter half of the movie, can’t quite push the project out of its sudden snooziness, a long spell where the kinetic sense of talk gets purposefully tamped down. There are ideas in the movie’s most spectacular failures, nevertheless. They aren’t always DeLillo’s ideas, to the extent that this is even a reasonable expectation. But the movie is always doing something — even if it isn’t always onto something. 

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The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of White Noise

The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat?

Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure.

Baumbach has made two of the best movies of his career for Netflix, and the cast he’s assembled here—including Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle—is top-notch. Given all of this, plus the fact that his source material is a near-canonical piece of literature, one might figure White Noise for an awards juggernaut, or at least a solid contender. Instead, White Noise debuted at this year’s fancy film festivals to mostly tepid reviews . It’s arriving online rather quietly, as an end-of-year oddity rather than an instant magnum opus.

White Noise is without a doubt a carefully made movie that tries gamely to give flesh to the unsettling spirit of DeLillo’s work, which many have deemed “ unadaptable ” over the years. I think that label is a little overstated, and Baumbach apparently does, too, because he’s imposed a fairly clear three-act structure and given the film a soaring score by Danny Elfman that crosses eerie synths with Aaron Copland–esque grandeur. The adaptation takes the tale of a 1980s family dealing with the aftermath of a local chemical accident and gives it the vibe of a classic Amblin movie. Of course, that dissonance is part of the novel’s parody, too, and maybe why White Noise feels so confounding—though not unrewarding—to watch.

Read: ‘That’s just like White Noise .’

DeLillo’s story takes stock of the hyper-capitalism of mid-’80s America. It deconstructs the bucolic lives of the successful academic Jack Gladney (played by Driver in the film) and his wife, Babette (Gerwig). Unable to enjoy the suburban splendor around them, they fixate on their fears of death and vain attempts at self-improvement. Baumbach does his best to infuse his film with mundane dread, but for the viewer, existential horror can be easily confused with a lack of energy.

Still, White Noise ’s first act is filled with the kind of snappy, overlapping dialogue Baumbach excels at. Jack fends off the sarcastic children in his blended family, works to learn German to lend legitimacy to his post as a professor of “Hitler studies,” and assists his fellow academic Murray Siskind (Cheadle), who’s attempting to launch a similar department centered on Elvis Presley. In one virtuoso sequence, Jack and Murray deliver simultaneous Hitler and Elvis lectures to the same rapt audience, trading back and forth on two very different 20th-century personality cults. Baumbach’s visual fluidity, and his camera’s awed dance around the lecture hall, is a joy to behold, given that he’s tended to work on a smaller scale.

That sequence crosscuts with a train accident that releases a deadly cloud of chemicals into the atmosphere—the catastrophic “airborne toxic event” that makes all of Jack and Babette’s fears of mortality suddenly feel much more urgent. Here, the film comes alive beyond its knowing satire; Baumbach wisely makes the ensuing terror a massive, nearly hour-long set piece—by far his loftiest thrill ride yet. The Gladney family watches the news with mounting concern, and then eventually hits the road along with everyone else in town. After getting caught in a miserably long traffic jam, they proceed to a quarantine center, where every directive from the government is as baffling as it is hopelessly mismanaged. It’s funny and surprisingly unnerving stuff.

The film also manages to feel contemporary without ever dropping the throwback aesthetic. Baumbach knows he’s making this movie for an audience that has suffered its own airborne toxic event, and he brings out little panicked details that ring uncomfortably true. Jack’s initial efforts to downplay the size of the disaster, both to reassure his children and himself, are heartbreakingly relatable. Though much of the ensuing drama pokes fun at Jack’s absurd efforts to be the family’s protective alpha male, Driver is terrific at conveying the joke without entirely losing his character to it.

White Noise ’s final act, in which the Gladneys try to return to their normal lives, is the toughest knot to untangle. For its challenging conclusion, the book intentionally goes inward, delving further into Jack and Babette’s insecurities. Baumbach, however, can’t switch from the film’s exaggerated tone to something more personal. The last showdown is loaded with sentiment but still painfully arch, which is probably why the film should be remembered simply as a curiosity—a fascinating adaptation that cannot overcome the scathing ridicule built into its source material. In this potentially waning age of prestige projects underwritten by Netflix, I certainly understand why Baumbach leapt to the challenge of making White Noise . Unfortunately, a graceful ending eluded him.

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In White Noise, Noah Baumbach takes Netflix’s money and runs

The Don DeLillo epic is ambitious, visually exciting, and Baumbach’s messiest movie yet

by Oli Welsh

When books are written about Netflix’s grand investment in prestige cinema, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise may go down as the movie that finally killed the goose that laid the golden budgets. This is not to say the streaming service will never again fund an auteur’s vanity project — it still hasn’t snagged that Best Picture Oscar, and, spoilers, this film won’t be the one to win it — but it’s unlikely to do it on this scale again. The Irishman was more expensive, Blonde was more of a disaster, but for sheer hubris, you can’t beat an apocalyptic period adaptation of a supposedly unfilmable literary classic, by a director better known for caustic domestic comedies, with a rumored budget of $140 million. We certainly won’t see the like again — not from Netflix, at any rate.

You may as well go out with a bang. Adapted from the beloved 1985 Don DeLillo novel, White Noise is a baffling, uneven, sporadically enthralling movie about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a dry run for the end of the world. It is basically three movies in one: a mannered satire of academia, consumerism, and the modern family is followed by a paranoid, Spielbergian disaster epic. The final third twists itself up into a queasy, surreal noir reminiscent of the Coen brothers at their most inscrutable. If you had to guess which one of these Baumbach handles most successfully, based on his previous work, you would almost certainly get it wrong.

Baumbach’s love for the source novel is obvious. This is a faithful, if surprisingly cheery and antic, adaptation. It misses only a handful of the novel’s beats, while the screenplay, which Baumbach wrote himself, reverently lifts great chunks of DeLillo’s dialogue and prose. But, fan credentials notwithstanding, the director is an odd fit for the book. Baumbach specializes in interpersonal dramedies, like Frances Ha or Marriage Story , written, performed, and shot in a naturalistic style. DeLillo’s book, however, is arch, stylized, and metaphorical, full of big ideas, big events, and solipsistic characters talking over and through each other.

The story centers on Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor at a pleasantly anonymous heartland university who has pioneered the provocative field of “Hitler studies.” At work, Jack covers up for his lack of actual scholarship (he can’t speak German) and engages in spiraling intellectual discourse with his friend Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), who is thinking of diversifying from car crashes into Elvis Presley. At home, Jack good-humoredly manages a bustling, argumentative blended family with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig). The besotted pair compete over which of them is more anxious about dying, but something seems genuinely wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is gathering on the horizon — literally. An accident unleashes a poisonous cloud known as the Airborne Toxic Event, and the Gladneys are caught up in a wave of panic.

Everything about this material, except its middle-class intellectual milieu, pushes Baumbach far out of his comfort zone. (It’s also the first period piece he has attempted, and the heightened, day-glo interpretation of the 1980s in the costuming and production design is one of White Noise ’s principal pleasures.) He rises to the challenge in unexpected ways. This is his most visually dense and imaginative film by a long chalk, and he deftly constructs a series of stunning set-pieces: an opening lecture by Don Cheadle’s character, Murray, intercut with archive car-crash footage; an academic duel between Jack and Murray, prowling and pontificating around a lecture theater as they weave the legends of Hitler and Elvis together; Jack’s genuinely spooky night terrors; and a theatrical confrontation between Jack and Babette, late in the movie, as he gets her to finally open up and confess what is wrong. The latter is exquisitely blocked and beautifully performed, by an anguished Gerwig in particular.

Although the showy, CGI train crash that precipitates the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t really work — it bluntly literalizes a disaster that, in the book, is all the more ominous for being distant and vague — what follows is an extraordinary, sustained sequence that echoes Spielberg’s masterpiece of collective madness, Close Encounters of the Third Kind . It turns out that, as a thriller director working on a grand scale, Baumbach has the goods. The scenes of gridlock and automotive carnage under boiling skies have a dreadful charge, while a stop at a deserted gas station has something of the exposed terror of Hitchcock’s The Birds . Later, Baumbach shows he can mix action with comedy in a farcical station-wagon car chase that could easily hail from a Chevy Chase movie from the period in which White Noise is set. Sometimes, Baumbach seems more instinctively aligned with the pop culture DeLillo was critiquing than with DeLillo himself.

Oddly for Baumbach, who is usually very generous with his actors, the cast flounders, adrift in the surreal grandiosity of the director’s design and struggling to find the rhythm in his collage of lines from the book. Cheadle, tweedy and quizzical, fares the best in this strange world, delivering statements like, “She has important hair.” Driver has some great moments and characterful bits of business — witness the way he shoves his hand up through his academic gown to push Jack’s tinted glasses up that magnificent nose, with a private smirk — but he’s sadly miscast. At 39, he’s at least a decade too young for Jack, and even the pot belly and patina of seedy middle age given to him by the makeup and costume departments can’t hide his essential virility. You just can’t buy Driver as a thwarted academic; his body doesn’t know what thwarted means. He’s very funny, though. Driver’s intensity often leads his comic skills to be overlooked, so it’s a pleasure to find as unlikely a film as White Noise bringing them to the fore.

The thing that most annoys DeLillo purists about Baumbach’s film might be the thing that makes it most pleasurable to watch for everyone else: It’s fun. It’s a messy movie that can’t quite find the thread to make sense of DeLillo’s vision or the reality of his characters — particularly during its bewildering final third, after the Airborne Toxic Event dissipates and Jack becomes obsessed with Babette’s place in a kind of pharmaceutical conspiracy. But it has been made with wit and an infectious relish. Baumbach lunges for laughs and scares, often successfully, and splashes the screen with bright color and movement. Under the end credits, he stages a dance number in the aisles of the supermarket that DeLillo and his pretentious characters imagine as the modern American church. Is Baumbach still making a point, or just cutting loose? The latter, I suspect, and more power to him. He took Netflix’s money and ran.

White Noise is out now on Netflix.

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White noise.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 0 Reviews
• Kids Say 2 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Ambitious but uneven drama has guns, crashes, more.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that White Noise is a drama adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 acclaimed (and deemed "unfilmable") novel. It tackles many serious themes -- including climate change, consumerism, drug use, and more -- and is presented in a highly artificial style. Violence includes guns and shooting, some…

Why Age 15+?

Infrequent dialogue includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "piss," "crotch," "dumb."

Guns and shooting. Characters are shot, with blood spurts and bloody wounds. Ble

Dialogue describing an affair. Kissing. Strong sex-related dialogue. Pornographi

Many brands shown throughout, especially in supermarket scenes (some specificall

Truck driver who appears drunk crashes truck while reaching for bottle of Jack D

Any Positive Content?

Touches on many themes, although none very deeply, including climate change, con

Main characters are a heteronormative White family. Some professors at the main

Characters mostly just blunder through their days, making mistakes, making unwis

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting. Characters are shot, with blood spurts and bloody wounds. Bleeding victim dragged on carpet and loaded into car. Huge crash: Delivery truck smashes into train. Car chase, with pedestrians struck. Various car crashes. More images of car crashes from various films/shows. Creepy dream sequences include a scary figure, characters smothered in bedsheets, plucking flesh from face, etc. Scary, creeping, toxic cloud. Characters pushing and shoving. A drop of raw meat spatters on a person's face at a butcher counter.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Dialogue describing an affair. Kissing. Strong sex-related dialogue. Pornographic novels shown. Sex workers shown. Crude drawing of naked woman, very briefly seen in trash.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Many brands shown throughout, especially in supermarket scenes (some specifically from the 1980s): Coca-Cola, Pepsi, KFC, Velveeta, Glass Plus, Pringles, Carefree gum, Sunny Delight, Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Sprite, Jack Daniels, Shell gas station, Yoo-hoo, Brillo pads, Doritos, Ritz crackers, etc. Radio ad for Eggo waffles.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Truck driver who appears drunk crashes truck while reaching for bottle of Jack Daniels. Character appears to be addicted to fictitious pill "Dylar." Frequent cigarette smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Touches on many themes, although none very deeply, including climate change, consumerism, quality of education, drug use/dependence, and mortality.

Diverse Representations

Main characters are a heteronormative White family. Some professors at the main character's college are Black, including a Black woman chemist. At least two Black characters, while certainly secondary, have personality and agency.

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Positive Role Models

Characters mostly just blunder through their days, making mistakes, making unwise choices, occasionally making it through.

Parents need to know that White Noise is a drama adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 acclaimed (and deemed "unfilmable") novel. It tackles many serious themes -- including climate change, consumerism, drug use, and more -- and is presented in a highly artificial style. Violence includes guns and shooting, some blood, and lots of vehicle crashes. There's also creepy, dream-like imagery and a threatening toxic cloud. Characters exchange sex-related dialogue, and there's kissing and a collection of pornographic novels. Infrequent language includes a few uses of "f--k," "s--t," and "piss." Characters smoke cigarettes, one appears to have a dependency on a fictitious pill, and a truck driver seems drunk, reaching for a bottle of Jack Daniels while driving. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

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What's the Story?

In WHITE NOISE, it's the 1980s, and Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) is a professor of Hitler studies, while his wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), leads exercise classes for seniors. They're both on their fourth marriages and have amassed several children between them. Their lives are chaotic but happy, especially when they visit their town's massive, shiny new supermarket. Then, after a delivery truck crashes into a train and releases an "airborne toxic event," the family must evacuate, leading to a series of hectic adventures, as well as Jack's possible exposure to the deadly stuff. Returning home, Jack tries to get to the bottom of Babette's sporadic memory loss, which may be linked to the mysterious pills she's been taking on the sly.

Is It Any Good?

A far cry from Noah Baumbach 's usual talky character pieces, this adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel is big, ambitious, bizarre, wildly uneven, sporadically funny, and weirdly worth seeing. Those familiar with the book (which was long considered "unfilmable") may have a leg up on others, especially since White Noise features long stretches of blocky chunks of artificial-sounding dialogue that careen up against one another, creating a cacophonous soundscape. But it also starts with a lecture by Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) about the beauty of car crashes that's flat-out hilarious. (In one scene, the movie pays film-nerd homage to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Week End , with its famous tracking shot full of stalled, ruined traffic.)

White Noise bounces back and forth between dialogue-heavy scenes -- including a verbose back-and-forth lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis -- and FX-laden sequences like a huge train wreck and a car chase scene. It seems to want to say a great deal, from the futility of the education system to the ridiculousness of consumerism and our overreliance on medication, but nothing hits very hard; nothing hits home. And Baumbach tries like crazy to be a "visual" director here, with poetic camera moves and pinwheeling shots around a room. But every so often, some odd combination of things feels just right, whether it be a sublime exchange between characters or a satisfying cut between shots. However, nothing is as totally wonderful as the end credits sequence: a musical number in a supermarket, with pastel colors popping and Andre 3000 from OutKast shimmying with a box of cookies. That alone is worth seeing twice.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about White Noise 's depiction of smoking and drug use . Are they glamorized? What are the consequences? Why is that important?

What role does violence play in the story?

What does the movie have to say about consumerism ? What do you think the filmmakers intended by showing so many brand-name products on-screen?

How does the movie address climate change? Could the toxic event have been prevented? Did the characters learn from it?

How does the movie differ from the novel, if you've read it? How is it similar? How is this story from the 1980s still relevant today?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 25, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : December 30, 2022
• Cast : Adam Driver , Greta Gerwig , Don Cheadle
• Director : Noah Baumbach
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : brief violence and language
• Last updated : March 9, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

White Noise Review

02 Dec 2022

White Noise (2022)

Across three decades and around a dozen directorial efforts, we have come to know what A Noah Baumbach Film is. We might expect some lo-fi Millennial Manhattanite angst ( Frances Ha ,  Mistress America ); perhaps a Sundance-friendly approach to middle-age male malaise ( Greenberg ,  While We’re Young ); or a deeply honest probing of relationships and family ( Marriage Story ,  The Meyerowitz Stories ).  White Noise , the filmmaker’s latest, has all of the above laced into it, full of his usual panache and intellectual rigour, but it feels deeply unusual for what we think of as A Noah Baumbach Film: this is an apocalyptic sci-fi spectacular, offering action set-pieces, dead bodies racking up, a sweeping Hollywood score from Danny Elfman — and a jarringly wacky post-credits dance sequence. It is an odd beast.

Adapted by Baumbach quite faithfully from the novel by Don DeLillo, it finds new meaning in the author’s ponderings on mortality and Cold War paranoia, given our current global anxieties — but it adopts a heightened take on the book’s ’80s setting, allowing for big hair and pastel, retro fashions. The film’s opening establishes its curious, arch sense of humour: Adam Driver is the rock-star professor of ‘Hitler Studies’ at the fictional ‘College-On-The-Hill’, quietly embarrassed at not yet being able to speak German. Together with Babette ( Greta Gerwig , a delight to see in front of the camera again after six years away), the couple raise a gently chaotic family of high-achieving children from across each other’s marriages. There are also oddball bit-parts from the likes of Don Cheadle , Jodie Turner-Smith and André Benjamin as fellow professors.

You’ll need to hold on tight, when the film morphs from a quirky family drama into doom-mongering dystopia.

It takes a little getting used to. Baumbach is no stranger to mannered speaking but the dialogue here feels like a particularly specific stylistic choice — deliberately unnaturalistic line-readings that could have come from a Yorgos Lanthimos film. Add some flashes of Wes Anderson (a former Baumbach collaborator) in its absurdities and flights of fancy, and it may require some calibration to its freaky frequency.

You’ll need to hold on tight, too, when the film morphs from a quirky family drama into doom-mongering dystopia. While it’s hard not to read a pandemic allegory into it — lines like, “I want to know how scared I should be!” feel plucked from the spring of 2020 — Baumbach seems keen to summon an overarching fear of mortality in all forms. Both Jack and Babette speak constantly of death, and openly hope that the other will die first.

Does it all cohere? Almost. Even if they sometimes feel catapulted in from another film, the action sequences are actually very well shot, and if you can get your head around the tone, it can be slyly funny. It’s really only in the third act, with a murder-conspiracy subplot, that the film starts to feel a bit too sprawling and messy. But it at least leaves things on a high, with that dance sequence, set to an LCD Soundsystem banger — satire you can groove to.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach’s Don DeLillo Adaptation Is Inspired — and Exasperating

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022  Venice  Film Festival. Netflix releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 25, with a streaming release to follow on Friday, December 30.

You might think it would be strange to see a mega-budget Noah Baumbach movie complete with CGI explosions, a Spielbergian kind of holy terror, and even one sadistically drawn-out jump-scare dream sequence, but the oddest thing about “ White Noise ” is its persistent sense of déjà vu . Not just the déjà vu of watching such a faithful adaptation of any Great American Novel — although there’s plenty of that — but also the déjà vu that’s supposedly caused by exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event at the center of Don DeLillo’s 1985 book, a prescient and enduringly tender Polaroid of our late capitalist society in which life has become indistinguishable from its own imitation, and death has become a thing that only happens to other people.

Fittingly, if not always to its credit, Baumbach’s film is split between seeming brand-new and all too familiar at the same time; equal parts inspired and exasperating, his “White Noise” is like hearing a sound and its echo all at once. At best, this adaptation uses that uncanniness to its advantage, leveraging its uniquely cinematic language to illustrate the role that movies play in creating the false memories that help distance us from the reality of our own demise (and contribute to the demise of our own reality).

At worst, Baumbach’s “White Noise” is made so wobbly by that uncanniness that it starts to feel as if it’s not an adaptation of DeLillo’s novel so much as an overworked distillation of its aura. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA isn’t in the movie because it becomes the movie itself: A picture of a picture that only allows us to see what others have already seen before. That’s what cinema is, of course, but that’s not all that it can be.

The touristic essence of Baumbach’s “White Noise” traces back to the filmmaker’s obvious affection for DeLillo’s writing, and to the many overlaps between their work: The affectless intermingling between love and cruelty, a shared penchant for what novelist Richard Powers refers to as “academic burlesque,” and a mutual understanding of the way that people cling to such language and crumbs of knowledge like driftwood to keep them from drowning in life’s chaos along with everyone else. Noah Baumbach has never written a character who wouldn’t lie to their doctor.

Outside of director adaptations like “Cosmopolis,” few movies have ever captured the author’s spirit better than Wes Anderson’s Baumbach-scripted “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the ethos of which — “We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts” — owes far more to DeLillo than it does to Roald Dahl. Ditto its forgiving take on the role of family in a consumer-driven civilization (“These apples look fake, but at least they’ve got stars on them”), and its supermarket dance finale, which Baumbach euphorically recreates at the end of “White Noise” with some help from LCD Soundsystem.

Remember the bit in “Greenberg” when Ben Stiller asks Chris Messina if his pool can overflow, only for Messina to snap: “Yes, the pool can fucking overflow!” Good luck thinking of anything else when professor Jack Gladney (a pot-bellied Adam Driver , sandpapering his signature ferality with a newly paternal softness) is evacuating his family away from the apocalyptic cloud of black chemicals that’s formed in the sky above their liberal college town. Played by a poodle-haired Greta Gerwig — inches away from going full Carol White — Jack’s fourth wife Babette comforts her 14-year-old stepson (Sam Nivola) that they won’t run out of gas. “There’s always extra,” she says. “How can there always be extra?,” the kid shoots back. Everybody knows they can’t just keep going forever, and yet modern life has made it so easy to believe that you will; no wonder this story’s flirtation with simulation theory has the whiff of wishful thinking.

DeLillo suggested that such belief was sustained by the ritualistic distancing from death; that America’s obsessions with shopping and spectacle, both of which achieved a new garishness during the Reagan era, are modern reactions to the same raw fear that has backstopped every religion since time immemorial. The low hum of the flourescent lights on aisle five helps muffle our mortal terror — so do the commercial jingles on TV (“Who wears short shorts?”) and the disaster footage the local news shares with us as soon as the ad breaks are over. Those other people are dead, which reinforces our faith that we are not like them. Jack teaches “Hitler studies” because nothing makes him feel safer than the belief that history’s most spectacular episode of dying is just behind him.

Professor Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ), Jack’s Elvis-obsessed colleague at the College-on-the-Hill, is addicted to car crash scenes in movies for much the same reason: To him, they are orgiastic monuments to life. Flaming shrines of naive innocence. He edits them into celebratory supercuts for his students, the faked carnage blurring into an explosive affirmation of real life. In what will prove to be one of his more radical deviations from DeLillo’s text, Baumbach refashions Suskind’s mid-book lecture (“I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism!”) into the electric prologue of this “White Noise,” setting the stage for a manic film of ideas that genuinely sympathizes with — and takes a certain giddiness in — the various coping mechanisms we use to ignore the deathward march of our own lives.

Baumbach recognizes that spectacle has evolved since 1985, but one of the strengths of his “White Noise” is that he recognizes how little has changed about its role in society. Not only does this adaptation refuse to update DeLillo’s story — the film’s sublime costumes, sets, and lighting taking softly fetishistic pleasure in every teal windbreaker, halogen lamp, and noir-tinged sheet of “Paris, Texas”-inspired neon green — it seeks to return the text to a time before it was diffused by all of the fiction it predicted.

Baumbach burns through DeLillo’s plot (such as it is) in a hurry, the writer-director more focused on careening between dark comedy and light terror than he is on getting to know the characters who are forced to go along for the ride. He ditches entire branches of Jack’s family in order to savor the novel’s show-stopping moments; the lecture duel between Jack and Murray is shot with the same “you gotta see this!” glee and kineticism as the dojo scene in “The Matrix.”

We know that Jack and Babette are still horny for each other despite everything, that she takes mysterious pills called Dylar that seem to mess with her memory, and that they both feel safe for the time being because it’s pretty rare for upper-middle-class white parents to die while their kids are still young enough to live at home. Jack’s colleagues — a group that also features Jodie Turner-Smith and the newly appointed patron saint of fun supporting roles in mainstream art films, André Benjamin — are mostly there to offset the poignancy of Jack’s voiceover (cribbed verbatim from the book) and keep things from growing too serious.

One hundred and four pages flash by in about 33 minutes of proto-Baumbachian conniptions and banter — much of which feels straitjacketed by DeLillo’s writing, as if Baumbach’s scabrousness were losing a war against his love for the source material — a big jolt is mixed into the warning that “whatever relaxes you is dangerous,” and then a truck crashes into a rail car and releases a “Nope”-like cloud of death over Jack’s entire life. That’s when things get really interesting.

If the first act of “White Noise” feels like a work of expert-level pantomime, the similarly faithful second act somehow creates an energy all its own. Baumbach knows that DeLillo anticipated the likes of “The Matrix,” “The Truman Show,” and scads of other stories in which reality becomes a simulation of itself, but those aren’t the movies he wants to remind you of here. A crucial difference between the “White Noise” of 2022 and the “White Noise” of 1985 is that Baumbach has already seen the movies that DeLillo’s book helped to inspire, and that frees him to have some fun with this one.

As Jack, Babette, and the four younger members of their blended brood (a terrific group that also includes Raffey Cassidy and May Nivola) attempt to flee the airborne toxic effect, trying to suss out how safe they should feel amid the traffic jam of other families trying to do the same thing, Baumbach switches to a register that we’ve never seen from him before. Suddenly we’re in “War of the Worlds” territory, complete with oodles of Spielberg Face and a menacing awe so artful and evocative that it feels more like the real thing than a commentary on it. Something I never thought I’d write about a Baumbach film: The CGI is fantastic.

The evacuation sequences viscerally convey the appeal of disaster movies by clinging to a character who refuses to accept that he’s in one (at least at first), or to acknowledge that death can still find him in a large crowd. Baumbach’s visual language ensures that we have no such trouble. We’ve seen “Independence Day,” “Deep Impact,” and enough films of its ilk to recognize what a massive disaster supposedly looks like, but Jack — living in 1985 — doesn’t have the same frame of reference. To him, his situation doesn’t feel like a movie, and so he’s slow to recognize it as a disaster (a phenomenon illustrated in the brilliant shot of a black cloud swallowing the glow of a Shell logo just above Jack’s shoulder). We have the opposite problem, and it epitomizes why “White Noise” may be even more relevant today than it was 37 years ago: When we reckon with a disaster that seems too much like a movie, we struggle to accept that it’s real. As a character puts it in the book, and possibly also in this film: “For most people there are only two places in the world: Where they live and their TV set.”

Baumbach has an absolute field day with this dissonance; the closer his characters veer towards danger, the more that Baumbach exaggerates the movie-ness of their existence. A dramatic car chase is shot like a scene from an ’80s road trip comedy like “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” complete with a slow-motion shot of the family station flying through the air. A climactic showdown in a seedy motel — the end of the Dylar affair — drips with De Palma, all the way down to an unmissable split-diopter shot.

It’s a good thing the movie’s semiotic pleasures are so pronounced, because the book’s more basic charms don’t quite survive the trip to the big screen (let alone the ride home to Netflix). That third act gunplay is typical of an adaptation that’s always smart and on edge, but seldom involving enough beyond that. DeLillo’s writing gives readers the space to see their own existential terror reflected back at them in the funhouse mirror of Jack’s absurd circumstances, but Baumbach’s “White Noise” — more externalized by default — proves too arch for our emotions to penetrate.

Baumbach’s film is so determined to feel like “White Noise” that it ends up wearing the novel like a costume, a sensation epitomized by its lead performance. Driver is far too young to play the 51-year-old Jack (even if 38 was the 51 of 1985), though his middle-aged cosplay contributes to the general air of simulacra. More difficult to excuse is the actor’s struggle to sell the journey of Jack’s epiphanies. Driver is so naturally wild with life that he never quite musters the latent fear needed to fuel his character through the first act; it’s the same reason why the self-possession Jack finds in the third act feels less earned than it does inevitable. It’s a fitting anchor for an adaptation that gets everything so right that you might yearn for the friction that comes with getting it wrong, or at least the tension that comes from pulling away.

It’s no coincidence that the film’s most ecstatic moments — the first scene, the last scene, and the Spielbergian chaos that runs down the middle — are also the ones that most deviate from the book. Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume. The sound of a beeping smoke alarm, perhaps.

“White Noise” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival . Netflix will release it in select theaters and on Netflix later this year.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach’s Satire Is Too Busy For Its Own Good

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This review was originally part of our coverage of the 2022 Venice Film Festival .

Don DeLillo ’s classic satirical novel, White Noise , was first published in 1985. Set in a fictional college town, the book used a toxic explosion to explore the oversaturation of news and misinformation, the overindulgent teachings in academia, our over-reliance on pharmaceutical solutions, the fear of chemical consumption in the air we breathe and in foods we eat, and gaslighting, both from a loved one and from the government. When it was written, the wit was a sharp but cutting criticism of the excessive consumerism and the navel-gazing opulence of the Reagan years. And with everything that’s come after the Internet, well, it’s only become even more prescient. Or to put it into pop culture terms, “that gum you like will come back in style.”

In the movie adaptation, Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, the go-to voice for Adolf Hitler studies. Greta Gerwig triumphantly returns to acting, her first live-action acting credit since 2016, playing Jack’s wife, Babbette. Jack gives grandstanding lectures on the most heinous and successful fascist of all time and Babbette instructs various group learnings at the local church. Together, they raise four children/stepchildren. Their oldest daughter ( Raffey Cassidy ) sees Babbette sneaking pills for a drug that’s not on the market, which she believes is causing her to forget more in their day-to-day life. While, Jack, high on his reverence on campus, continues to think everything is okay in his home life until a chemical explosion forces him to become a man of decisive action instead of merely a man of knowledge. (In one of the finer comedic moments in the movie, after continued misinformation from local agencies about how to respond to the airborne toxic event, Jack sees a bumper sticker that reads “Gun Control = Mind Control” and declares its best to follow that vehicle because “they seem like they would know how to survive.”)

Noah Baumbach ( Frances Ha, Marriage Story ), as a filmmaker, seems like a misfit choice to direct an adaptation of DeLillo’s book. In retrospect, it makes more sense than originally thought. Not just for poking fun at the academic setting (something Baumbach has been doing since his first film, Kicking and Screaming ) but because Baumbach has always appreciated a non-sequitur. But while Baumbach favors a setup, DeLillo’s rapid humor generally comes from a barrage of non-sequiturs; the characters in White Noise all have information to impart, but it’s usually so unrelated that the father at one point asks if anyone is even listening to anyone. The reason why Baumbach seemed like an odd choice to me was because of how visual the film would have to be to pull off the noise pollution components of the story. He’s known for his use of language but not his visual language. Odd enough, it’s the visuals in White Noise that work the best in creating the proper mood of the film, and it’s the humor that’s often off. Satire is one of the trickiest things to translate from page to screen and White Noise never really cuts as deep as it should because the communication of the jokes is so rushed — via DeLillo’s style that’s quicker to process on the page than it is to export to the screen.

RELATED: From 'Marriage Story' to 'Frances Ha': Every Noah Baumbach Film, Ranked

White Noise is a very busy movie — both verbally and visually. The gears of the plot are constantly changing, from an academia satire, to the toxic event and later still, into the lies within a marriage. The busyness of the plot works best in the center because the reaction to the unknown makes sense for a chaotic canvas and randomness. Conspiracies start spreading. Health officials are unable to generate actionable responses beyond death that might happen within 30 years. And the more scientific the information becomes, the more scared everyone feels because each new thread of information doesn’t provide a clear answer, but it sure sounds worse.

When the Gladneys are moved to a Boy Scout camp run by a simulation organization, Jack Gladney’s thesis on Hitler’s followers — that they became what they wanted to be, a crowd — plays out before him. Their daughters sob that the scariest thing is that they can’t be told how exactly they should feel. They desire to have “the proper reaction.”

This is the most visually expressive of Baumbach’s oeuvre. Because the fear of death is a major thread through all machinations of the narrative, there is a stark use of dark vs. light. Jack and Babbette speak openly about dying, but it’s secretly an all-consuming fear. Their openness is an attempt to trick them from thinking otherwise and Lol Crawley ’s cinematography is exemplified when framing their fears. But the visual nature of the film goes beyond the lighting and also into Jess Gonchor ’s production design. The supermarket, bright in its light so that all the brand names can be seen and provide comfort, juxtaposes Jack’s private fears, where drapes and sheets cover his own vision of death. The college where Jack teaches has classrooms that look like the children’s section of a library, seemingly both satirizing and validating conservative fears that colleges are indoctrination centers for the young.

Still, while the look of the film is solid, it further illustrates how White Noise has so many moving parts and individual scenes outshine the sum of those parts. The academic setting seems to muddle with where Baumbach is placing the heart of the story: the survival of an event and the survival of a marriage. It’s practical to hand talking points directly to the viewer (such as in the opening, where Don Cheadle , playing a professor at the College-on-the-Hill, dissects the glee of filming a car crash by saying that the quest for narrative goes out the window in such scenes and a joyful innocence steps in.) But the shifts in attention also keeps the adaptation from discovering a stable groove for the main characters, particularly Babbette, who is mostly reduced to telling the audience her motivations. These motivations, unfortunately, set up a third act of diminishing returns via a brand-new character who’s been separate from all previously established satirical realms. In the end, White Noise is guilty of being what it criticizes: too much .

White Noise is now available to stream on Netflix.

• Movie Reviews
• White Noise (2022)
• Noah Baumbach

White Noise (2022) Movie Review – Musings on the inevitability of death

Musings on the inevitability of death.

It may come as a surprise that Noah Baumbach ( Frances Ha , Marriage Story ) would depart from his personal, naturalist style to make White Noise , an absurdist film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s famous 1985 novel. But look closer and you’ll see relatable themes just as those that have long interested the director. Predominantly, in this case, the universal struggle against the inevitability of death.

Like most of us, I’d wager, White Noise ’s characters are afraid of death–and this film was perhaps born of the same fear. It was 2020, at the start of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, that Baumbach reread DeLillo’s book and found parallels to our own dark times.

Baumbach proceeded to faithfully follow the novel in his movie, which follows Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a college professor of his self-created Hitler Studies department. He and wife number 4 Babette (Greta Gerwig) have four kids, together and from different marriages.

Jack’s days are spent helping colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) create his own Elvis Studies department, taking clandestine German lessons to prepare for an upcoming Hitler conference, and worrying about Babette’s use of a mysterious pill called Dylar–but mainly, in delighting in his beloved family. Utterly in love with each other and with life, Jack and Babette can’t abide the thought of dying or losing each other. But intrusive thoughts soon become a realer possibility when a train wreck releases deadly chemicals into the air of their town, creating a situation called the “airborne toxic event.”

DeLillo’s novel has long been considered unadaptable due in part to its complex explorations of death, consumer culture, technology, and intellectualism–just to name a few themes. In a little over two hours, Baumbach unsurprisingly isn’t able to mine the depths of DeLillo’s work, but does give a valiant effort.

One could even say he’s too faithful with the source material, rigidly transposing dialogue straight from the page. This works occasionally to highlight the absurdity of everyday conversation–until calculated banter awkwardly gives way to a stiff statement from Jack that was never meant to be anything but his inner voice.

Above all, Baumbach captures the novel’s emphasis on death and society’s attitude towards it. There’s a scene in the book, only alluded to by Jack’s daughter Steffie in the film, where the grade school has to evacuate due to kids “getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths.” No one knows what caused it, although investigators give a long list of potential reasons: “the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation…” The list goes on. It’s not until dangerous symptoms stare school officials right in the face that they are enabled to act. What DeLillo accomplishes through this scene–that contradictory mix of fear and callousness toward death–permeates throughout Baumbach’s adaptation. The message is both extremely current and for all time.

The “airborne toxic event” plot is resolved fairly quickly so the film can move on to other “deathward” plots. And although the emotional climax is somewhat harried and flat, maybe that’s the point. One distraction, and the horrors of this world become only white noise in the background, washed up by the bright colors of consumerism–but also the presence of loved ones. There’s a compelling blend of hope and dread, then, in one of 2022’s last film releases.

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• Verdict - 7.5/10 7.5/10

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White Noise Review: Exhilarating, Weird Fun With Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig

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Rebel Ridge Review: This Is How You F*cking Do It

Speak no evil review: mcavoy show-stops but speak about the danish original instead, 10 great movies that had disastrous test screenings.

White Noise , the great novel from Don DeLillo, is many things — a postmodern comedy about academia, a damning critique of consumerism, a meditation on the fear of death, an apocalyptic epic, an experimental deconstruction of American culture. What many believed it wasn't, however, was adaptable. Noah Baumbach is here to prove them wrong with possibly the boldest and most entertaining film of the year.

White Noise stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig as a married couple (their fourth marriage) during the early '80s. He's a college professor (of 'Hitler studies') and she teaches classes to the elderly, as well as doing her best with the four children they share from different marriages and together. One day, a train crashes near their college community, releasing a toxic gas that causes an evacuation. The film is told in three parts: before, during, and after the 'airborne toxic event,' and was probably the most fun audiences have 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 potbelly and prescription sunglasses that are halfway between dorky and creepy. He's incredible here, as is Gerwig , playing his perpetually permed wife Babette ("she has important hair," one character says). They seem to genuinely love their life, and dance around the kitchen table discussing esoteric topics while their chorus of kids cut in and out like a radio flipping through channels. Even when a traffic accident and Babette's mysterious reliance on pills cause massive conflict, threatening everyone's life and sanity, the film carries the same energetic joie de vivre of the Gladneys.

Though the airborne toxic event threatens their lives (in addition to a bizarre, off-market pill named Dylar), the swirling cinema on display here keeps any surreal or silly moments somehow believable and gripping. This is partly because Baumbach films it all so well, bringing to mind the incredibly detailed soundscape and panoply of dialogue in Robert Altman movies . There always seems to be at least one person talking in White Noise ; if you can keep up, it's utterly exhilarating, and the most exciting thing onscreen this year.

Aside from the Gladney family (which also includes the truly impressive sibling actors Sam and May Nivola, along with a wonderful 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 film feels like a postmodern ballet (something which becomes literal by its closing credits, set to a brand-new song from LCD Soundsystem), with the anamorphic camerawork seamlessly changing focus and tracking the movements of multiple characters. Aside from the physical motion, the auditory motion is relentless, with the sound design of the film hectically shifting from voice to voice in subtle ways. To just sit back and experience this film is a real treat, and while it may stream on Netflix, watching it in a theater is unforgettable.

Don DeLillo's Dialogue Comes to Life in White Noise

It's not just the balletic audio, but the very words each character speaks which is so entrancing. While Baumbach is a modern master of dialogue, the success of White Noise is ultimately owed to DeLillo, who stuffed so many intimidatingly intelligent and funny lines in one book that it's surprising each paperback doesn't immediately explode like some jack-in-the-box, bursting from the seams. Baumbach wisely transfers the novel's words almost line for line in some places, even if the film is missing some of the greatest portions of the novel (such as 'the most photographed barn in America' section).

Related: These Are the Best Noah Baumbach Films, Ranked

It's an extremely difficult task, however, attempting to film DeLillo's dialogue (which is intellectual to the point of parody, yet still enlightening). It's often hard to imagine actual human beings saying the author's great lines — "The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation;" "Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom;” "May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.”

Somehow, almost miraculously, Baumbach and his cast manage to pull it off in spades. The filmmaker incorporates a great deal of the original novel's brilliant dialogue, which is often in stark contrast to Baumbach's more naturalistic movies, such as Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale, and Frances Ha . In fact, this entire film seems to be an odd passion project for Baumbach, a true anomaly in his much more grounded career, because White Noise is anything but grounded.

From its meticulously choreographed sequences, grand disaster movie scenarios, moments of CGI, and massive assortment of extras and practical effects, White Noise is the furthest thing anyone would've expected form 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 lauded moniker of 'the great American novel.' However, perhaps White Noise is more akin to Baumbach's themes 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 Whale , to the complete lack of life experience of the intellectual played by Ben Stiller in Greenberg , Baumbach has been like 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 difficulties. 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 at its most emotionally poignant when it's focusing on the beauties, mundanity, terrors, and struggles of marriage. These aren't the funniest or most exciting moments in the film, but Baumbach seems to forge a new path, an emotional core, into DeLillo's cold novel through this route.

Related: Exclusive: Lars Eidinger Gives Update on Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig's New Film White Noise

What makes this all work is Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, who somehow manage to adopt the same stilted formalism of DeLillo's dialogue but with a three-dimensional life outside the novel. What they do here is nothing less than magical, slipping into the postmodern caricatures of human beings, wearing their clothes for a while, and literally bringing them to life. If Baumbach's film is something distinct form DeLillo's White Noise , it's because of these two actors, who fully commit to characters who shouldn't seem real whatsoever. Somehow, in their utter commitment to the formalist dialogue, Driver and Gerwig create real people.

White Noise Might Be the Best Movie of the Year

If this all sounds abstract and confusing, that's because White Noise is as well. This is a film where people study the beauty of car crashes, where they speak poetically about Hitler and Elvis in the same Shakespearean cadence, where they debate over the proper terminology to define the massive death cloud raining disease upon them.

This isn't a neat movie, and it doesn't fit into any single genre. It's a family comedy, and then it's an apocalyptic nightmare; it's a suspenseful thriller, and then it's a cartoonish musical. Just as DeLillo's novel was so overstuffed with ideas, Baumbach's White Noise is overflowing with cinema, oozing brilliance in the messiest of ways, jumping from one brilliant scene to another without a moment of respite. It's sometimes painfully relentless, never once going where you'd expect it to, and thus rewarding multiple viewings (preferably in theaters).

Between the 'airborne toxic event,' the evacuations, and the quarantines, much of White Noise feels like the ultimate Covid film. Exploring the before, the during, and the after, White Noise seems to be the most comprehensive movie about our collective Covid-19 experience and the subsequent existential traumas most of us have had.

While the third act stumbles quite a bit, tripping over the weight of its own ideas and veering into total silliness, this is the truly perfect Covid film. Despite its flaws and endless contradictions, the experiment which Baumbach undertook here pays off in spades, exploring death and social anxieties better than anything else in recent years. It's zany but dark; it's thought-provoking but endlessly entertaining; it has awe-inspiring intelligence, but it's occasionally incomprehensible. It's perfectly imperfect, and perhaps the best movie of the year.

Produced by Heyday Films, NBGG Pictures, and A24, White Noise will be in theaters Nov. 25th, and will be available on Netflix beginning Dec. 30th.

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Culture & Arts

Am i racist, documentary | matt walsh confronts white guilt in humorous, sometimes absurd scenarios caught on camera.

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Rated PG-13 • Theaters A couple of years ago The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh created a documentary with the provocative title What Is a Woman? in which he dismantled the claims of the transgender movement. Now he applies his humorous brand of gonzo journalism to another of the political left’s social concerns in Am I Racist ? Walsh poses as someone on a journey of discovery, hoping to find how he, a white man, can absolve himself of guilt and end systemic racism. He reads books, gets a dubious “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” certification, and interviews DEI facilitators. He even hosts his own workshop. Am I Racist? has some truly amusing scenes (though the documentary includes foul language, uttered mostly by people dedicated to the cause). Walsh deadpans convincingly as he converses with proponents of anti-racism. He has a knack for asking seemingly ingenuous questions that often make his interlocutors sound like the real racists. It’s a shame he didn’t rely on this tactic more. The documentary often veers into absurdity with Walsh indulging in socially awkward behavior that creates cringe-­inducing situations only tangentially related to race. Walsh talks to plenty of regular folks who don’t seem to think racism is as big a problem as these DEI facilitators think it is, but this documentary is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. People invested in the idea of systemic racism will take the average American’s lack of interest as evidence for systemic racism. Even so, Walsh clearly shows the financial incentive the DEI industry has for keeping racism alive and well. Every time he speaks with a new proponent of the anti-racist ideology, he includes how many thousands of dollars their dubious advice costs.

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Collin is WORLD’s arts and culture editor. He is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Louisiana State University and resides with his wife and four children in Sugar Land, Texas.

@collingarbarino

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ロアーの映画ログ（ブログ支部）

インスタにポストしている映画の感想をまとめるための支部, 【映画】ホワイト・ノイズ.

" 言語化 されたカオス"のような映画だった。

（2022/12/31） Netflix （吹替）

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