Review by Nicholas Porteous for Mr. Will Wong
An ‘airborne toxic event’ lurches into the lives of an unsuspecting family in White Noise, an adaptation of the Don DeLillo Novel and Noah Baumbach‘s most expensive movie yet–likely ever!
Adam Driver is Jack, a university professor and academic to the core of his being, but he’s not alone! White Noise poses the question ‘what if everyone in the world–including AndrĂŠ 3000–was an insatiable academic?’ with hilarious results. Baumbach is not at all concerned with transforming the rigid, professorial dialogue emanating from every character into something naturalistic. He doesn’t want to make this world feel too wacky either, striking an interesting balance that falls somewhere between deadpan and surreal. I found the strange tone of this movie pretty delightful. Baumbach manages to skewer these easy, pedantic targets as a means of covertly bringing us that much closer to their real struggles. It’s fascinating that a novel from the mid-’80s would produce possibly the most relatable covidy-Covid movie that isn’t literally about Covid thus far.
White Noise is also very much a filmed novel. While Baumbach does a fantastic job staging the book on a scene-by-scene basis, the overarching structure of the Movie runs into some issues. It’s divided into three parts which feel very episodic and might have been better suited to a mini-series format. The first part sets the stage and introduces Driver, Greta Gerwig, their family, and Driver’s work family of professors who dote on his every ponderance. The middle part is the most obviously cinematic–full of action sequences and ramping chaos. The final part, without spoiling anything, is relatively much less exciting–at least in movie form.
I can certainly imagine the culmination of the story’s many theses feeling much more gripping on the page, where we can truly get inside our hero’s head and every turn of thought might be as wild as a car wreck, but when we’ve only just experienced as much visually, it’s tough to compete. I think on some level Baumbach is aware of this sharp dramatic decline, because he chooses to close the Movie with a phenomenal End Credits sequence that will keep most of the audience glued to their seats until the very end. If After Yang is the current record-holder for best opening credits, White Noise is its fresh young rival.
And if you’re a Baumbacher and you can roll with the admittedly somewhat lacking novel-to-movie construction, you’ll find this airborne toxic event very sick indeed.
WHITE NOISE is in select theatres starting December 2, 2022.
Global release on Netflix December 30, 2022.
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