White Noise
Noah Baumbach
, selected cinemas, including UK’s on 5 January
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White Noise is brimming with ideas. And why wouldn’t it be? This film is the latest from writer-director Noah Baumbach, who created The Squid and The Whale and Marriage Story, smart, painful satires chronicling the breakdown of relationships.
Baumbach adapted White Noise from the eponymous book (which won author Don DeLillo the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1985) during covid-19 lockdowns, seeing parallels between its story and the chaotic ways people were responding to the turmoil of the pandemic.
But while White Noise makes fascinating reading even at a first pass, the film careens from idea to idea with such abandon it will probably take more than one viewing to fully appreciate its ambition and intellectual scope.
Set in 1984, White Noise revolves around the Gladney family, who are sent into a frenzy when a train carrying chemical waste crashes near their home town. Only the family patriarch, Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, remains calm, promising his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and the four children in their blended family that everything will be OK.
That is until a poisonous cloud – called “The Airborne Toxic Event” by one of the characters – heads towards them, which finally provokes the family to decamp in their station wagon and seek shelter elsewhere. As pandemonium grips the town, Jack struggles to keep the family calm and together, while Babette fails to hide her increasing dependence on a mysterious vial of pills.
Baumbach draws on many cinematic styles to create a story that pulsates with energy. The action scenes and family dynamics borrow heavily from Steven Spielberg, the fast-paced dialogue is straight out of Hollywood’s screwball comedy playbook of the 1930s and 1940s, while the characters’ pursuits and general sense of ennui recall films by the Coen brothers, especially A Serious Man.
Despite the postmodern, fractured essence of White Noise, there is a sweetness and heart to the Gladney family that shines through, and the surprising number of laughs ensure that the film is always entertaining. But as it meanders to the end of its 136-minute running time, it becomes obvious that White Noise’s themes aren’t going to come together in any satisfying or tidy manner.
This was always unlikely: its source material, after all, is a complex novel that dissects vast themes including death, academia, capitalism and religion. And Baumbach seems aware that White Noise has been described as an unfilmable novel, at times leaning into the challenge as he encourages viewers to look beyond the story and its characters to the subtext bubbling beneath pretty much all of its scenes.
When its conclusion does finally arrive, you will grasp that the film makes a lot more sense once you think long and hard about it. But does it do enough to encourage viewers to make that kind of effort? Despite the ambition of Baumbach’s writing and direction, you just might find yourself happy to never think about it again.
