White Noise (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Netflix doesn't always produce daring, genre-bending major projects, but when one drops, it really demands our attention. I'm not a big fan of Noah Baumbach (who previously teamed up with Netflix for Marriage Story), but when a name like his helms a film adaptation of such a famous novel by someone like Don DeLillo, it's important. This is one of those watershed moments of big names, big titles, and even bigger ideas. How do you adapt a novel typically perceived as unfilmable? Well, first you attach a director who revels in that kind of challenge. It's a daring film in content and style, all the more potent as we culturally emerge from pandemic anxieties to re-evaluate our preoccupation with things like business, education, and the ways we've structured society to make life easier for us even as it then establishes a structure for our lives.

White Noise, the novel, was published in 1985 and while Baumbach's film faithfully adapts it in that regard, it certainly speaks to us today. When a devastating train wreck releases an "Airborne Toxic Event" and people are forced to quarantine amidst conflicting medical and political reports -- and no small amount of conspiracy theories -- a family already dealing with existential crises are forced to make sudden, dramatic choices to determine their own fates. That's, arguably, the easiest way to describe the basic plot of this film, even though it really only comprises the second act of the movie; each of the three acts is introduced by on-screen text. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is terrified of dying, and so when the event occurs, he's relatively calm about it because he has already spent his life worrying. His family, however, panics: his wife Babette (Great Gerwig) becomes convinced she's sick, while their daughter Denise obsessively consumes the news about the toxic cloud of gases drifting ever closer to their home. Their blended family, which includes three other children (Babette is Jack's fourth wife), goes on the run only to end up exactly where they started. They're just an average American family facing an apocalyptic event.

But White Noise is about much more than this, and that's where Baumbach really shines, especially in the first act. Our introduction to the Gladneys wouldn't be out of place in a Wes Anderson film in terms of its absurdism. Jack is a professor and apparently the world expert on Hitler Studies -- a field he pioneered -- although he secretly can't speak any German. He and his colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) vie for higher enrollment as Siskind attempts to follow suit by establishing the field of Elvis Studies. Meanwhile, we learn that Jack and Babette have a mutual fear of death, one they often discuss, especially now that Jack has been having nightmares of a shadowy, mysterious man trying to murder him. Denise notices that Babette has been taking a secret prescription, one we later learn was a trial drug to treat people with an overwhelming phobia of dying. It's funny because of Baumbach's stylized approach and because it's all a little too relatable; at least these people talk about their fears and problems.

They also attempt to cover over these fears by buying pretty things and making themselves busy, which is even more relatable. In Siskind's lecture that opens the film, he discusses how a car crash in a film is cathartic. It's awful, of course, much like the Airborne Toxic Event to come, but it makes everything else (plot, character, theme) irrelevant for enough time that the audience feels kinship: ultimately, we all do pretty much the same thing in imagining what we'd do in that situation. We feel at peace when we fit in with the crowd. White Noise visually demonstrates this repeatedly, as the Gladneys almost constantly take stock of themselves in relation to others, perhaps nowhere more so than at the A&P grocery store. This reprises itself in the film's denouement and closing credits in one of the funniest scenes, an extended dance sequence begging us to think if we're avoiding reality with pretty-colored and fun distractions, and then to ask if having fun doing that is a bad thing.

I personally found the film delightful, although its third act never quite landed with me. Tonally, it gets much darker and slower, and the comedy mostly gives way to melodrama. Baumbach even flirts with turning the proceedings into a thriller, as Jack hunts down the shadowy man from his nightmares who he learns may be Babette's prescription drug dealer and/or lover. Driver is great at handling the awkwardness of his character alongside the awkwardness of the plot, but as the screenplay dives into more serious territory with lengthy dialogue scenes about weighty matters, the film loses most of its momentum. Satire and marital drama can be paired, but this film doesn't quite handle it the same way it treats the satire of the first two acts. I wanted Baumbach to keep up the playfulness he already established -- helped by Danny Elfman's wonderful score -- with Lol Crawley's cinematography and some eye-popping production design by Jess Gonchor; together, they craft a realistic world that feels just "off" enough to remind us that the world is a funny place, even in its menacing attributes.