Writer-director Noah Baumbach is back with White Noise, an adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel of the same name. Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle, the film is a satire that aims loftily but never rises above its half-formed ideas and haphazard execution. Bogged down by uneven plot and genre shifts, White Noise gets lost in the chaos of what it's trying to say and fails to be fully realized or coherent.
Jack Gladney (Driver) and Babette (Gerwig) live in a college town where they raise their four children together and through marriage, both their fourth. Jack is a professor of Hitler studies and dreads his upcoming lecture. When her daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) discovers that Babette has been taking a mystery drug, she urges Jack to do something about it, but the truth may not be what he's willing to hear. Meanwhile, a truck collides with a train on the outskirts of town, causing an airborne toxic event that exposes the community to chemical waste, prompting everyone to evacuate before it's too late.
Director: Noah Baumbach
Writers: Noah Baumbach, Don DeLillo
Stars: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle
White Noise is inconsistent and tonally uneven, with characters looking more like cartoons than fully drawn people. It's hard to understand this messy and unnecessarily complicated movie where the credits sequence is the best part, and what the rest of the movie should have emulated more of. There is little to no feeling involved, and a disconnect is felt between the audience and the story. This detachment is most obvious in the second half of the film, which is wildly different from the first half. It feels more like you're looking at two very disparate stories: both have so much potential, but are endlessly frustrating and tedious to sit through. Driver and Gerwig are solid and seem to be having fun on screen, but the material just isn't there for them. Don Cheadle, who plays Jack's colleague Murray Siskind, has very little to work with, but he's still good despite a limited role.
White Noise often has no goal. Yes, the movie's themes aren't exactly subtle, especially in the first half, where everyone is constantly and loudly distracted by what's going on around them to focus on what really matters. The film and the book on which it is based amplify the obsessions, consumption and fear that plague humanity, but the film's satire doesn't offer much depth or humor in examining the subject. It all just happens, its intricacies lost in the cacophony of the film's own noise and chaos, the latter of which only works immediately after the truck-train collision.
Baumbach's film can be occasionally exciting and happily weird. His focus on the dishonesty that festers in relationships and how people continue to get distracted, even when faced with the possibility of the world deteriorating, is certainly compelling. But the points that the movie is trying to make have been explored in other movies, and more effectively. A film can only get so far on its themes if it's not willing to fully explore them beyond the surface. To that end, White Noise seems to have a lot to say, including a direct line on existential dread, but it all gets lost amidst superficiality and its own distractions, which undermine the film's overarching themes. In this way, it becomes what it tries to analyze, and a shadow of what it could have been.
The film opens in limited theaters on November 25 and will be available to stream on Netflix on December 30. It is 136 minutes long.
Watch White Noise 2022 Movie Trailer
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