"White Noise": Noah Baumbach's bombastic mess

A review.

In Noah Baumbach’s new film White Noise, renowned Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) begs for a mysterious, definitely illegal drug that may cure his existential dread. It doesn’t matter whether or not it actually works, though. Here’s the thing, Jack says: "The power of suggestion makes some people sick, others well…If I think it will help me, it will help me.”

White Noise prizes suggestion over substance. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s notoriously “unfilmable” postmodern novel of ideas, the film is chock-full of big ideas that suggest greatness. But because ideas and themes and theories reign supreme in White Noise, everything else takes a backseat, making what the film suggests better than what actually happens on screen. Real postmodern stuff.

Jack lives in an uncanny, hyperconsumerist midwestern town, where he teaches at the College-on-the-Hill, secretly takes German lessons, and half-fathers four children/stepchildren. He notices his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) secretly taking pills, but she tells him life is good, so life is good, right? That is, until an airborne toxic event ruptures their town, and the couple is forced to confront their imperfect marriage and impending sense of doom. White Noise is an absurd and inscrutable film about the absurdity and inscrutability of modern life.

With $80 million from Netflix, Baumbach is more ambitious than ever—he can afford explosions, car crashes, and gas clouds now. He should keep an extra script about people arguing in Brooklyn apartments in his back pocket, though, because while White Noise proves Baumbach a great director on a large scale, he’s at his best when working with his own material.

Baumbach tries to capture the surrealistic dry comedy of DeLillo’s writing and keep his ideas about capitalist excess, mass culture, and crumbling belief systems intact. White Noise’s offbeat, disorienting tone is charming and hilarious, up until it punctuates itself with a knowing wink. An early scene where Jack and professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) debate whether Hitler or Elvis was more of a mama’s boy starts off strong. As the two pompous academics get more impassioned, the room becomes electric and explodes in applause. Then, the camera lingers on Jack’s wistful face as the crowd envelops him. In DeLillo’s novel, Jack’s narration in this section reveals his ability to confront death in an academic setting. The film’s narration-free version, however, makes a mockery of their debate.

The irony extends to the costuming and production design: Driver’s fake receding hairline and Gerwig’s cartoonish curls make them look like caricatures, and the town’s oversaturated rainbow colors douse it with artifice. The film is so imbued with irony that any sense of sincerity becomes obscured. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this film is but a simulation of someone else’s ideas, its characters vehicles for something untouchable.

Despite its singular tone, White Noise still feels like it contains about ten films in one, and Baumbach directs them all with style: a Spielbergian sci-fi, a prequel to Marriage Story, a Disney Channel road trip flick, a neo-noir, and an episode of Stranger Things to name a few. The film’s final curtain call-esque dance sequence, set in an A&P superstore to LCD Soundsystem, is absolutely absurd and glorious. It’s fitting for a film about late-capitalist excess to feel excessive, but White Noise lacks the narrative momentum and tension to justify it.

Jack and Babette are both deathly afraid of death. That’s what motivates them, supposedly, but we don’t know it until they say so. Like the novel, the film is divided into three acts, but it shifts focus too many times and becomes disjointed. None of the characters’ desires feel truly realized, leading to an ending that, while shocking and tense, is ultimately unearned.

What makes White Noise so fascinating is the possibility that it’s intended to be this way. That it’s disjointed, because DeLillo wrote it this way. That it’s unfocused, because postmodern cinema is meant to subvert narrative convention. That desires are diluted, because that reflects a world desensitized to emotions. But that sounds like an argument Jack would make—a product of the very mode of thinking that both the novel and the film satirize.

Like every other character in the film, Jack’s understanding of reality is based on images and ideas. When he learns of Babette’s depression, he’s upset that she doesn’t match his notion of her: "This is the whole point of Babette. She's a joyous person. She doesn't succumb to gloom or self-pity…The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me, she reveals and confides.” Jack postulates what things are supposed to mean, because he’s unable to see things as they are. How could anyone?

DeLillo’s ideas have already been dissected, distorted, and diluted, and this will likely continue for eternity. As the film is a simulacrum of the novel, this review is a simulacrum of the film. Truth is not an option, so why not make meaning? The whole point of White Noise is that it gives people something to look at, something to think about. It’s unique and stylish, and deals with ideas rarely put to screen on such a large scale. And it gets better, the more you think about what it means, and the less you remember what actually happened.