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Death unites us all. And societies are shaped by not just the dread of that inevitable outcome but the common manners in which we push those existential thoughts aside. Consumerism, conspiracy theories, and collective trauma collide in Noah Baumbach's daring adaptation of a novel that may have been published in the mid-'80s but undeniably speaks to the issues that continue to dominate our culture in the 2020s. A story of a family unmoored from their already fragile existence by an airborne toxic event has relevance to the COVID era that author Don DeLillo couldn't have imagined specifically. Yet, the source material here is designed to speak to a larger sense of trauma and fear—elements that will never go away as long as that pesky Grim Reaper remains in our lives. Baumbach's adaptation of "White Noise" unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches. Life is full of surprises, right?

"White Noise" opens with a professor named Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) speaking of the comfort of car crashes on film. Like every choice in this script, it's not an accident. Siskind speaks of the simplicity of the car crash, noting how it cuts through character and plotting to something that's easily understood and relatable. It foreshadows the mid-section of a film that will play essentially like a disaster movie, asking viewers to imagine what they would do if stuck in the same situation. And it's a set-up for another fascinating aspect of "White Noise"—a commentary on crowd catharsis. We are at peace when we see others doing the same thing we are doing, whether it's watching a car crash in a movie, attending an Elvis concert, or buying things we don't need at an A&P grocery store.

Someone who keenly understands groupthink is Professor Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), one of the world experts on Hitler Studies, even though he's embarrassed that he doesn't speak German. The first act—and the film is divided into three parts on-screen—could be called a satire of academia as Gladney, Siskind, and their colleague use big words to help get a grip on big problems. Jack and his wife Babbette ( Greta Gerwig ) have a blended family that includes the anxiety-prone Denise ( Raffey Cassidy ), problem-solving Heinrich ( Sam Nivola ), and two more children. Babbette has forgotten things lately, and Denise notices a new prescription bottle for a drug called Dylar. This is an everyday American family—going through the motions of life as they try to push away the issues that have dogged philosophers for eons, like the meaning of it all and how to stop thinking about when it ends. In one of the best early scenes, a comment about how happy they are leads Babbette and Jack into a conversation about who should die first. 

While death is a concern in the first act of "White Noise," it becomes more tactile in the second act, titled "The Airborne Toxic Event." A train crash at the edge of town sends chemicals flying into the sky, and everyone in the Gladney family except Jack panics. As he tries to defuse the situation, Denise becomes convinced that she's sick already, and Henrich obsessively listens to news reports. Before long, they're on the road in a mass evacuation, and one of Baumbach's most impressive technical achievements unfolds, capturing a family on the run from the unknown.

Without spoiling the final act completely, it re-centers the Gladneys back at home, but with death a much more present reality in Jack's mind. Unfortunately, as the intensity rises, "White Noise" loses some of its impact, especially in a few talky scenes near the end that betray the tone of the first half. Yes, the film always deals with "serious" subjects, but it gets rocky when they take center stage, and the tone struggles to merge satire and marital drama. DeLillo's book was notoriously called "unfilmable" for decades, and it feels like this last act is where that's most apparent.

Thankfully, Baumbach has two of his most reliable collaborators to keep it from going off the rails. Driver is, once again, excellent here, crafting a performance that is often very funny without relying on broad character beats. There's a version of this character that's pitched to eleven—the awkward academic forced into trying to keep his family alive despite his inferior skill set—but Driver gives a performance that's often very subtle even as everything around him is going broad. Gerwig is a little oddly mannered early in the film, but that makes sense for a character who becomes somewhat unmoored before the air around her becomes toxic.

To unpack this epic of existential dread, Baumbach has assembled a team that deserves mention. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (" Vox Lux ") finds the right balance between realism and parody in his camera work, giving much of the film an exaggerated look amplified by Jess Gonchor's ace production design. The A&P here, with its bright colors and shelves of identical items, is not quite reality, but it's close enough to make its point, and the chaotic sequences of panic in the mid-section have the energy of a CGI blockbuster. Finally, Danny Elfman's score is one of the best of the year, connecting the three tonally different sections.

What does it all mean? Why do we take pills, buy junk, and watch car crashes to escape our fears? The phenomenal A&P dance sequence that ends "White Noise" lands a key theme in a fascinating way—we may all just be buying colorful stuff we don't need to distract ourselves from reality, but let's at least try to have fun while we're doing it.

In limited theatrical release now. On Netflix on December 30 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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White Noise (2022)

Rated R for brief violence and language.

135 minutes

Adam Driver as Jack Gladney

Greta Gerwig as Babbette

Raffey Cassidy as Denise

Sam Nivola as Heinrich

May Nivola as Steffie

Don Cheadle as Murray Siskind

Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards

André 3000 as Elliot Lasher

Lars Eidinger as Arlo Shell

• Noah Baumbach

Writer (based on the book by)

• Don DeLillo

Cinematographer

• Lol Crawley
• Matthew Hannam
• Danny Elfman

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‘White Noise’ Review: Toxic Events, Airborne and Domestic

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel is a campus comedy, a domestic drama and an allegory of contemporary American life.

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By A.O. Scott

Late in “White Noise,” after the ecological disaster known as the “airborne toxic event,” on the heels of a professional triumph, and in the throes of marital woe, Jack and Babette engage in a discussion of religion with an acerbic German nun. Instead of piety, she offers a pragmatic, borderline cynical view of how faith operates. If she and her colleagues “did not pretend to believe these things,” she says — referring to “old beliefs” in stuff like heaven and hell — “the world would collapse.”

The nun, played by the formidable Barbara Sukowa, has been carefully airlifted from the pages of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel into Noah Baumbach’s new film. So have Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who head up a rambunctious blended family in a Midwestern college town. Jack, known in academia by the decorative initials J.A.K., is the founder of the college’s department of Hitler Studies. Babette teaches life skills to the elderly and infirm.

Back to Sister Hermann Marie: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else in the world takes seriously,” she says. This may or may not be true of nuns, but it can often feel glumly applicable to writers and filmmakers, especially those who try to chart an independent course. Somebody has to care about art and literature. With respect to DeLillo, Baumbach is very much a believer. His “White Noise” is a credible adaptation and a notably faithful one — what an earlier Baumbach character might call the filet of DeLillo’s bristling, gristly book. Very little has been added, and what’s been taken out will be missed only by fanatics. (A warning and maybe a spoiler for DeLillo-heads: The most photographed barn in America is nowhere to be seen.)

The challenges inherent in the project are bravely faced and honorably met. The novel straddles domestic realism and speculative satire. It’s a campus comedy stapled to a family drama and tied up with a ribbon of allegory. Its contemporary topics — no less relevant now than in the ’80s — include intellectual fashion, pharmacological folly, environmental destruction and rampant consumerism. These collide with eternal themes: envy, love, the fear of death.

Baumbach’s reverence for the material is evident from the trompe l’oeil opening sequence — footage of car crashes from old movies, accompanying a lecture by a professor of popular culture — through the end credits, which turn DeLillo’s vision of supermarket heaven into a bouncy LCD Soundsystem music video. Driver, paunchy and swaybacked, is the very model of a modern middle-aged professor, his intellectual curiosity muffled by a certain complacency. He’s a happy man whose vocation is horror.

In the campus lunchroom, he sits in on bull sessions with colleagues, inhaling gusts of competitive explanation. The movie’s dialogue, compulsively true to DeLillo, bristles with explanations and random facts. Except for the toddler, the kids in the Gladney household — Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and his daughter, Steffie (May Nivola); Babette’s daughter, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) — bounce around the kitchen like human Google results pages, asking out-of-left-field questions and citing semi-relevant data. Jack and his pal Murray (Don Cheadle), the car-crash scholar looking to expand his academic portfolio, are more inclined to hermeneutics. In one of Baumbach’s bravura set pieces, they improvise a classroom duet for an audience of rapt undergraduates, comparing and contrasting mother-love and the death drive in Hitler and Elvis.

What they have to say sounds pretty dubious — Murray and Jack broadcast the kind of mock-profundity more common among students than faculty — and the question is to what extent that’s deliberate. “White Noise” is a frequently funny movie that is also utterly in earnest.

The kids do say the darnedest things, but they are also vessels of anxiety and avatars of vulnerability. The wounds and salves of family life, in particular the abrasions of matrimony, are Baumbach’s specialty. Jack and Babette’s particular marriage story, which comes into focus in the final third of the movie and is tied up with a noirish pharmaceutical subplot, is the heart of “White Noise” — rawer and sweeter than the surrounding material. Driver and Gerwig give warmth and texture to characters who were, in DeLillo’s pages, a little abstract. Their function was largely to organize the novel’s ideas.

The status of those ideas is the biggest problem with Baumbach’s film. He is perhaps too dutiful in transcribing DeLillo’s vision of contemporary life, a landscape of material comfort and intellectual dread, dominated by brand names, untrustworthy information and the looming threat of destruction.

Random insights, like Murray’s observation that the family is the origin of misinformation, are preserved as if they were museum pieces in a carefully curated historical exhibit. Making “White Noise” a period film — the uncannily precise ’80s environment is the work of Jess Gonchor, the production designer, and Ann Roth, who did the costumes — inevitably blunts its impact. Things that might have made readers squirm in the 1980s are shrouded in nostalgia in 2022. It’s hard to feel existential terror when you’re ogling the A.&P. supermarket, the landline phones, the printed classified ads and the boat-shaped rear-wheel-drive station wagons.

Within this world, you can see premonitions of our own, most notably in an evacuation shelter where anxious people create in effect an IRL prototype of Twitter, gathering around unverified experts (including Jack’s son, Heinrich) and parroting their wisdom. Baumbach, working on a larger scale than he has before, pulls off a few fine cinematic coups, one of them involving that station wagon fording a swollen stream.

But there is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. “White Noise” is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.

White Noise Rated R. The fear of death. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes

In this prophetic/topical/overly-spelled-out fable, Adam Driver, as an entitled professor, and Greta Gerwig, as his haunted pill-popping wife, lead a college-town clan on a collision course with disaster.

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In the early scenes, one recognizes, and responds with jittery pleasure, to the Baumbach touch. “White Noise” is set in a cozy leafy college town, which has grown up around a small liberal-arts school called The-College-on-the-Hill, and that makes the movie an ideal vehicle for the kind of high-spirited disputatious chatter that Baumbach is a wizard at. The central character, Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), teaches at the college, where he has pioneered an entire discipline devoted to Hitler Studies — which sounds like a Woody Allen joke, except that the film, like Jack, takes it all quite seriously. Jack isn’t just teaching about Hitler; he’s the excavator of the dictator’s soul, a rhapsodist of fascism.

Jack’s wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), has hair that looks like an ’80s perm (though in fact it’s natural) as well as an attitude that’s spiky enough to balance his exultant narcissism, and she pops mysterious pharmaceutical pills on the sly. They’ve each been married three times before, and between them they’ve got a reasonably well-adjusted brood of broken-home children: the sharp teenager Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and her sweet younger sister Steffie (May Nivola), who are Babette’s daughters, the chip-off-the-old-block brilliant talker Heinrich (Sam Nivola), who is Jack’s son, and a young son who is both of theirs. They’re like the Brady Bunch with a touch of the Sopranos, and Baumbach, for a while, keeps the family dialogue humming.

He also introduces us to Jack’s academic colleagues, who are treated as gently cracked without being mocked, notably Murray (Don Cheadle), who is some sort of American Studies professor with a profound take on the cheesiest dimensions of American society. He thinks that supermarkets are a deep form of nirvana, and the film opens with his lecture, illustrated by a dazzling montage of film clips, on the meaning of the car crash in Hollywood cinema, which he views as a pure expression of joy (and genius). In a way, this sets the tone for all that follows. It lets us know that “White Noise” is going to be, on some level, about violence and catastrophe, and that it’s going to regard those things with a funny and ironic sidelong eye.

The first clue that we’re watching more than just an observational comedy about a nutty professor and his fractured family comes when a man driving a truck full of toxic chemicals crashes into a train, and the accident produces a massive black chemical cloud that hovers in the distance, edging inexorably toward the town. Will it move in and poison everyone? As Jack and his family pile into their Chevy station wagon, evacuating in a miles-long traffic pile-up as portentous as the one in Godard’s “Weekend,” the film, just like that, becomes a metaphorical disaster movie about fear, conspiracy, and the toxicity of consumer products.

Those pills Babette pops turns out to be harbingers of the new world. They’re not uppers — they are, rather, mood stabilizers meant to quell her fear of death. Jack and Babette are both obsessed with death (their idea of screwball chatter is discussing which of the two of them is going to die first), and when Jack, during that toxic-cloud escape, steps out of the car for two minutes to fill the gas tank, he learns he may have gotten a lethal dose of chemicals. Or given how nuts the doctors in this film sound, is that diagnosis just another conspiracy?

These are heavy questions, and “White Noise,” on the page, achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, “White Noise” announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them. Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, “White Noise” has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news. How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of “New Body Rhumba” by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality “White Noise” could have used more of.  

Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins.

• Production: A Netflix release of an NBGG Pictures, Heyday Films production, in association with A24. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman, Uri Singer. Executive producers: Brian Bell, Leslie Converse.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera: Lol Crawley. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Danny Elfman.
• With: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Niviola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin, Sam Gold, Carlos Jacott, Lars Eidinger, Francis Jue, Barbara Sukowa.

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White Noise review: Noah Baumbach wrestles with a brilliant, impossible novel

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig go deep into a 1980s fever dream in the director's intriguing but uneven adaptation.

Postmodernism is a hell of a drug. In the opening chapter of Don Delillo's classic 1985 novel White Noise , a college professor named Jack Gladney relays the ordinary details of his world: a wife, four children, the daily campus grind. He speaks of station wagons and airport Marriotts, corduroyed coworkers and trips to the grocery store. And yet nearly every line wriggles with surreal comedy, panicky and elastic and preposterously alive. For several decades, various Hollywood luminaries tried and failed to take it on; Noah Baumbach is the first to succeed, and his adaptation, which had its North American premiere last night at the New York Film Festival before it lands on Netflix this December, feels like a film made with deep respect and affection for its source material. But it also seems, in nearly every scene, like he's dancing about architecture, trying to wrest something from the strange magic of those pages that refuses to be translated to the screen.

It helps that he has two of his favorite collaborators to help carry the load: Adam Driver , whom he's now worked with five times, is the garrulous, Buddha-bellied Jack, and Greta Gerwig , another regular coconspirator and also Baumbach's partner in life, is Jack's wife Babette, a suburban goddess in a blonde spiral perm. It's the fourth marriage for them both and soft middle-age is settling in, though they're still almost unfailingly hot for each other in and out of the bedroom. There are also three children from previous unions — imperious teen Denise (Raffey Cassidy), along with Heinrich and Steffie (real siblings Sam and May Nivola) — and one small product of their own, a beaming cherub named Wilder. Life in the Gladney house carries on in a state of messy domestic bliss, tempered with the usual petty irritations and complaints, until the day a highly flammable tankard collides with a train outside of town, and a noxious black plume appears on the horizon.

Soon the plume has been upgraded to something officials are calling an Airborne Toxic Event, though semantics don't really explain what that means for all the distraught humans on the ground. Ordered to evacuate, they set out for temporary shelter, one more freaked-out family in a tangle of standstill traffic and hazmat tents. But what are the little white pills that Babette keeps surreptitiously popping, insisting it's just air or cherry LifeSavers when she's pressed? If you're familiar with the book, you may have some recall of what follows, though Noise is hardly linear in any traditional sense of plot or pacing.

Baumbach lays out numerous setpieces — at the college where Jack teaches Hitler Studies; in the stacked, gleaming aisles of the local A&P; even an unscheduled car ride down a river — with high auteur style, steeped in the shiny consumerism and thrumming low-grade paranoia of peak-'80s America. He draws great, zesty performances from his supporting cast, including Don Cheadle as a garrulous fellow professor, and the German actress Barbara Sukowa as an ornery apostate nun. (Nobody casts extras like him, too; they have faces ). Driver brings something both salty and haunted to Jack, and Gerwig feels like a beating heart, alive to every sunburst and storm cloud of her emotional weather.

But they all have to reckon with dialogue whose satirical fizz and deadpan rhythms don't often translate to anything resembling real life, and a book whose brilliance stubbornly resists any other medium but itself. Compared to the tender groundedness of Baumbach's finest films, like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story , the scampering leaps and feints of his script here come off as deliberately arch, even artificial. The movie's final scene, though, without spoiling too much, is also easily its best: a bravura grocery-store dance sequence anachronistically soundtracked by the Brooklyn art-pop band LCD Soundsystem that recalls everything from Jacques Demy's French New Wave classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to the 2003 Japanese marvel The Blind Swordsman . It's nothing like the ending of the novel, and maybe that's why it's so good: a moment of pure unfettered inspiration, joyful in its own noise. Grade: B–

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Review: ‘White Noise’ puts a loud, brash and enjoyable spin on a Don DeLillo classic

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“White Noise,” Noah Baumbach’s jittery and inventive adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, begins with what you might call a love letter to cinema. We’ve had a lot of those recently , but this one — a college lecture on car crashes in American movies — is appreciably sharper, funnier and more specific than most. As his students watch a montage of fiery vehicular explosions, professor Murray Jay Siskind (a wonderful Don Cheadle) implores them to look past the violence and see the spirit of optimism and enterprise pulsing underneath: “There’s a constant upgrading of tools, skills, a meeting of challenges,” he marvels. “The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something loud and fiery, head-on.”

Baumbach, a specialist in complicated human passions, appears to have taken the professor’s enthusiasm to heart. Before long, he’ll stage his own elemental pileup: An oil tanker truck T-bones a freight train, sending its chemical cargo flying every which way and igniting a conflagration that belches deadly black smoke into the sky. There’s nothing optimistic about what happens next, but the moment of collision is executed with undeniable gusto; Baumbach does, for a moment, seem like the proverbial kid playing with a big honkin’ train set. Here and elsewhere in “White Noise,” he happily applies himself to the upgrading of tools and skills, and to the meeting of the formidable, some would say foolhardy, challenge before him.

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DeLillo’s novel — bursting with theories both prescient and otherwise about consumerism, addiction, environmental decay, (mis)information overload and the universal if also uniquely American fear of death — has long been deemed unfilmable, as novels of ideas are reflexively assumed to be. In this case, there’s not only the danger of mishandling the author’s satirical targets or the icy precision of his latex-glove sentences, but also the risk of approximating them too closely, of locking them away in a remote, often fondly nostalgized ’80s moment and draining them of their corrosive, unsettling power.

Baumbach does not quite surmount this obstacle; an eerie climax and one pretty good jump scare aside, the terror here belongs more to the characters and their era than it does to us and ours. But his affection for the novel produces its own warm, countervailing energy. Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

Here, in the domestically contented but existentially paranoid flesh, are Jack Gladney (Adam Driver, paunchy) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig, curly), raising four kids, three from past marriages, in a college town whose heart is its campus and whose soul is its supermarket. Lol Crawley’s grainy-textured widescreen images (shot on 35-millimeter anamorphic film) steer us through the messy living spaces and immaculate grocery aisles of a postmodern “Brady Bunch,” where boxes of Tide and cans of Coca-Cola gleam out at us with an almost otherworldly sheen. (Jess Gonchor’s production design nails the ’80s vibe and branding perfectly.)

We also spend some time with Jack’s professor colleagues (they include a curt Jodie Turner-Smith and a delightful André Benjamin) as they hold intellectual court, never more mesmerizingly than when Jack and Murray deliver a dual lecture comparing and contrasting the early lives of Hitler and Elvis. Jack is one of the country’s leading professors of Hitler studies, which makes his limited grasp of German his most embarrassing secret, at least initially. (Here it may be worth noting the presence of at least two marvelous German actors, Lars Eidinger and the veteran Barbara Sukowa, both perfectly cast in crucial roles.)

Babette, who teaches posture classes for the elderly, is hiding her own deep, dark secret, namely the pills she keeps popping when she thinks no one’s looking. But except for their adorable toddler, Wilder (played by Dean and Henry Moore), their kids notice everything and delight in challenging parental authority, especially Babette’s stubborn, concerned daughter Denise (a terrific Raffey Cassidy) and Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), a fount of pessimistic data who’s the first one to notice that deadly black cloud headed their way.

Until that point, “White Noise” has found a pleasurable sweet spot between the Baumbachian and the DeLillo-esque. Much of the tetchy, disorienting domestic banter, with its volleys of data and non-sequitur factoids, comes straight from the novel, even as the disorienting screwball rhythms (the editing is by Matthew Hannam) and the overlapping lines of dialogue hark back to the director’s earlier comedies like “The Meyerowitz Stories” and “Mistress America.” But once its famous “airborne toxic event” is set in motion and the entire town is forced to evacuate, the movie, like Danny Elfman’s wondrously nimble score, kicks into overdrive. Soon Jack, Babette and the kids are on the run in their station wagon, with death looming in the rearview mirror and some vintage Spielberg riffs on the road ahead.

The pitch-perfect mimicry of ’80s action-thriller clichés — just count how many garbage cans get knocked over by cars screeching in reverse — is something only a contemporary retooling of a retro story could have pulled off. That knowing playfulness is part of the movie’s charm; so is the spectacle of Baumbach, a master of intimate, small-scaled comedy, embracing the conventions of the big-budget apocalyptic thriller, complete with lethal lightning storms, an unexpected river cruise and endless, chaotic traffic jams.

But Baumbach doesn’t stop there. He may faithfully adhere to the novel’s three-act structure (the rhythm of its many short, self-contained chapters proves more elusive), but his shrewdest and most suitably postmodern gesture is to offer up a highly elastic palimpsest of allusions, genres and styles. Primarily a domestic-romantic drama and a satire of academia before it becomes a full-blown disaster epic, “White Noise” also morphs, in its climactic stretch, into a seedy motel-room noir, a Monty Python sketch and, supremely, an LCD Soundsystem dance musical. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

This stylistic verve can sometimes feel liberating, an inspired rejoinder to the clinical perfection of DeLillo’s prose. And sometimes it can feel like too much, to the point of becoming absorbed and lost within the story’s white-noise barrage: the marketing slogans, the academic bull sessions, the pointless government directives when all hell breaks loose. Maybe that’s the point. For DeLillo purists and scholars, surely the movie’s least forgiving audience, Baumbach’s attempts at narrative compression will seem especially glaring. He has streamlined the book’s cast — gone is Babette’s gun-supplying dad — and trimmed or removed some of its choicest aphorisms. In trying to both preserve and open up a much-canonized text, he sometimes falls into an all-too-familiar adaptive compromise.

Some of Jack’s mordant first-person insights on the page have been reassigned to other characters on the screen, a shift for which Driver’s performance compensates to no small degree. He’s entirely believable as the outwardly impressive but inwardly insecure academic, desperate to maintain a sunny outlook even under fast-darkening skies. Jack may be the most ridiculous of the glaringly imperfect spouses Driver has played recently (in “Annette” and “Marriage Story”), and also the most redeemable. Gerwig is no less movingly misguided as Babette, who — like her husband, but through more extreme measures — tries to sublimate fears, both rational and irrational, of impending doom.

“We are fragile characters surrounded by hostile facts,” Babette notes, tweaking without materially changing a sentiment from the novel. The absurdity of these characters is inseparable from their pathos, and the director’s obvious affection for them, and for his two lead actors, makes them more affecting still. The warmth of feeling that suffuses the movie’s final moments may not be the most faithful salute to DeLillo, but it is very much the point of this “White Noise.”

‘White Noise’

In English and German with English subtitles Rated: R, for brief violence and language Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles, and Bay Theater, Pacific Palisades; starts streaming Dec. 30 on Netflix

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‘white noise’ review: adam driver and noah baumbach take a bold stab but don delillo’s novel still seems unfilmable.

Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle also star in Netflix's Venice opener, an absurdist apocalyptic vision of one family grappling with the specter of disaster and death in a world spinning off its axis.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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That perception doesn’t change a lot with this valiant Netflix adaptation. It feels like the streaming service was so high on the deserved critical acclaim for Baumbach’s Marriage Story that they gave him carte blanche and a mountain of cash to make his passion project, a property that had defeated more than one filmmaker in development hell before him.

This is Baumbach’s third feature for Netflix, and its greatest strength recalls the first of those, The Meyerowitz Stories — the affectionate observation of a rambunctious family who tend to talk all at once, often at cross-purposes.

Here it’s the blended family of Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) and his wife Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), each of them on their fourth marriage and raising the children of previous unions — Jack’s analytically inclined teenage son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and sensitive younger daughter Steffie (May Nivola); and Babette’s hard-nosed 11-year-old Denise (Raffey Cassidy), vigilantly monitoring her mother’s neurotic behavior; as well as the 6-year-old son they had together, Wilder (played by twins Henry and Dean Moore).

A gaggle of caustically opinionated professors — including characters played by Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin and New York theater director Sam Gold — provides texture. The most substantially fleshed out of them is Murray Sisskind (a wonderful intellectual caricature from Don Cheadle ), who teaches a course in pop-cultural iconography that, right off the bat, will make you want to enroll.

Murray opens the film with a class on the car crash in Hollywood movies, rhapsodizing about the “secular optimism and self-celebration” delivered in big-screen auto collisions, each one more spectacular than the last. He enthuses over footage of mangled metal and flaming wreckage, admiring a carefree, lighthearted quality that foreign movies could never approach. One of the standout set-pieces of this enjoyable early section is an impromptu joint lecture in which Jack lends his campus rock-star mystique to Murray’s class as they parallel the lives of two mythic figures, Hitler and Elvis Presley, respectively.  

At home, Jack and Babette both fret about being the first to die, left to face the abyss alone. Death is a hot topic in the ramshackle house, with the kids rushing to the TV to watch news coverage of a plane crash.

So far so good. It’s when Baumbach’s script shifts from wry situational observation into more concrete plot incident that the material starts showing its age and the literary roots become more cumbersome.

There are fun touches, like science geek Heinrich gaining social confidence as he regales the crowd of evacuees at a camp with his detailed insights. But the film overall becomes steadily less involving — and more grating in its quirks — as it explores both the ecological and emotional fallout of the chemical spill.

The focus starts to seem pulled in too many directions, including the proliferation of conspiracy theories; the family’s concern over secretive Babette’s memory lapses due to an experimental anxiety drug called Dylar; the role of a shadow figure known as Mr. Gray (Lars Eidinger); and Murray planting the idea in Jack’s head that perhaps he can overcome his own fear of death by taking someone else’s life.

The power of violence and terror to reunite families in troubled times still seems a ripe notion for satire, as does the American dependence on pharmaceuticals for comfort and the long reach of eco-messes in our lives. But the movie’s manic machinations become less, not more, connected to any tangible contemporary reality, making it play like a period piece trapped in amber. Even rollicking sequences like Jack and brood speeding away from danger in the family station wagon, temporarily set adrift on a river, don’t build much comic momentum.

As the pilot for all this mayhem, Driver certainly commits; he makes amusing use of his outsize physical presence by swooping around the College-on-the-Hill campus wearing his academic gown like a vampire’s cape.

Gerwig, sporting a mop of tight curls that Murray describes as “important hair,” fades away much like her character, who spends stretches of the movie staring out a window in sweats, lost in numbed anxiety. The kids remain more captivating, with Sam and May Nivola (the children of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer) making lively impressions, while Cassidy is an appealingly bossy presence, in many ways the most responsible figure in the house.

“We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts,” says Murray late in the action, articulating a thesis about learning to shut out that world, however temporarily, that coheres only intermittently in the film. More apropos is Jack’s comment near the start: “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can.” Only in the closing supermarket dance explosion does that exhortation become truly infectious. Despite the movie’s inconsistency, at least it sends you out on a high.

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In White Noise, Noah Baumbach takes Netflix’s money and runs

The Don DeLillo epic is ambitious, visually exciting, and Baumbach’s messiest movie yet

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When books are written about Netflix’s grand investment in prestige cinema, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise may go down as the movie that finally killed the goose that laid the golden budgets. This is not to say the streaming service will never again fund an auteur’s vanity project — it still hasn’t snagged that Best Picture Oscar, and, spoilers, this film won’t be the one to win it — but it’s unlikely to do it on this scale again. The Irishman was more expensive, Blonde was more of a disaster, but for sheer hubris, you can’t beat an apocalyptic period adaptation of a supposedly unfilmable literary classic, by a director better known for caustic domestic comedies, with a rumored budget of $140 million. We certainly won’t see the like again — not from Netflix, at any rate.

You may as well go out with a bang. Adapted from the beloved 1985 Don DeLillo novel, White Noise is a baffling, uneven, sporadically enthralling movie about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a dry run for the end of the world. It is basically three movies in one: a mannered satire of academia, consumerism, and the modern family is followed by a paranoid, Spielbergian disaster epic. The final third twists itself up into a queasy, surreal noir reminiscent of the Coen brothers at their most inscrutable. If you had to guess which one of these Baumbach handles most successfully, based on his previous work, you would almost certainly get it wrong.

Baumbach’s love for the source novel is obvious. This is a faithful, if surprisingly cheery and antic, adaptation. It misses only a handful of the novel’s beats, while the screenplay, which Baumbach wrote himself, reverently lifts great chunks of DeLillo’s dialogue and prose. But, fan credentials notwithstanding, the director is an odd fit for the book. Baumbach specializes in interpersonal dramedies, like Frances Ha or Marriage Story , written, performed, and shot in a naturalistic style. DeLillo’s book, however, is arch, stylized, and metaphorical, full of big ideas, big events, and solipsistic characters talking over and through each other.

The story centers on Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor at a pleasantly anonymous heartland university who has pioneered the provocative field of “Hitler studies.” At work, Jack covers up for his lack of actual scholarship (he can’t speak German) and engages in spiraling intellectual discourse with his friend Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), who is thinking of diversifying from car crashes into Elvis Presley. At home, Jack good-humoredly manages a bustling, argumentative blended family with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig). The besotted pair compete over which of them is more anxious about dying, but something seems genuinely wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is gathering on the horizon — literally. An accident unleashes a poisonous cloud known as the Airborne Toxic Event, and the Gladneys are caught up in a wave of panic.

Everything about this material, except its middle-class intellectual milieu, pushes Baumbach far out of his comfort zone. (It’s also the first period piece he has attempted, and the heightened, day-glo interpretation of the 1980s in the costuming and production design is one of White Noise ’s principal pleasures.) He rises to the challenge in unexpected ways. This is his most visually dense and imaginative film by a long chalk, and he deftly constructs a series of stunning set-pieces: an opening lecture by Don Cheadle’s character, Murray, intercut with archive car-crash footage; an academic duel between Jack and Murray, prowling and pontificating around a lecture theater as they weave the legends of Hitler and Elvis together; Jack’s genuinely spooky night terrors; and a theatrical confrontation between Jack and Babette, late in the movie, as he gets her to finally open up and confess what is wrong. The latter is exquisitely blocked and beautifully performed, by an anguished Gerwig in particular.

Although the showy, CGI train crash that precipitates the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t really work — it bluntly literalizes a disaster that, in the book, is all the more ominous for being distant and vague — what follows is an extraordinary, sustained sequence that echoes Spielberg’s masterpiece of collective madness, Close Encounters of the Third Kind . It turns out that, as a thriller director working on a grand scale, Baumbach has the goods. The scenes of gridlock and automotive carnage under boiling skies have a dreadful charge, while a stop at a deserted gas station has something of the exposed terror of Hitchcock’s The Birds . Later, Baumbach shows he can mix action with comedy in a farcical station-wagon car chase that could easily hail from a Chevy Chase movie from the period in which White Noise is set. Sometimes, Baumbach seems more instinctively aligned with the pop culture DeLillo was critiquing than with DeLillo himself.

Oddly for Baumbach, who is usually very generous with his actors, the cast flounders, adrift in the surreal grandiosity of the director’s design and struggling to find the rhythm in his collage of lines from the book. Cheadle, tweedy and quizzical, fares the best in this strange world, delivering statements like, “She has important hair.” Driver has some great moments and characterful bits of business — witness the way he shoves his hand up through his academic gown to push Jack’s tinted glasses up that magnificent nose, with a private smirk — but he’s sadly miscast. At 39, he’s at least a decade too young for Jack, and even the pot belly and patina of seedy middle age given to him by the makeup and costume departments can’t hide his essential virility. You just can’t buy Driver as a thwarted academic; his body doesn’t know what thwarted means. He’s very funny, though. Driver’s intensity often leads his comic skills to be overlooked, so it’s a pleasure to find as unlikely a film as White Noise bringing them to the fore.

The thing that most annoys DeLillo purists about Baumbach’s film might be the thing that makes it most pleasurable to watch for everyone else: It’s fun. It’s a messy movie that can’t quite find the thread to make sense of DeLillo’s vision or the reality of his characters — particularly during its bewildering final third, after the Airborne Toxic Event dissipates and Jack becomes obsessed with Babette’s place in a kind of pharmaceutical conspiracy. But it has been made with wit and an infectious relish. Baumbach lunges for laughs and scares, often successfully, and splashes the screen with bright color and movement. Under the end credits, he stages a dance number in the aisles of the supermarket that DeLillo and his pretentious characters imagine as the modern American church. Is Baumbach still making a point, or just cutting loose? The latter, I suspect, and more power to him. He took Netflix’s money and ran.

White Noise is out now on Netflix.

The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of White Noise

The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat?

Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure.

Baumbach has made two of the best movies of his career for Netflix, and the cast he’s assembled here—including Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle—is top-notch. Given all of this, plus the fact that his source material is a near-canonical piece of literature, one might figure White Noise for an awards juggernaut, or at least a solid contender. Instead, White Noise debuted at this year’s fancy film festivals to mostly tepid reviews . It’s arriving online rather quietly, as an end-of-year oddity rather than an instant magnum opus.

White Noise is without a doubt a carefully made movie that tries gamely to give flesh to the unsettling spirit of DeLillo’s work, which many have deemed “ unadaptable ” over the years. I think that label is a little overstated, and Baumbach apparently does, too, because he’s imposed a fairly clear three-act structure and given the film a soaring score by Danny Elfman that crosses eerie synths with Aaron Copland–esque grandeur. The adaptation takes the tale of a 1980s family dealing with the aftermath of a local chemical accident and gives it the vibe of a classic Amblin movie. Of course, that dissonance is part of the novel’s parody, too, and maybe why White Noise feels so confounding—though not unrewarding—to watch.

Read: ‘That’s just like White Noise .’

DeLillo’s story takes stock of the hyper-capitalism of mid-’80s America. It deconstructs the bucolic lives of the successful academic Jack Gladney (played by Driver in the film) and his wife, Babette (Gerwig). Unable to enjoy the suburban splendor around them, they fixate on their fears of death and vain attempts at self-improvement. Baumbach does his best to infuse his film with mundane dread, but for the viewer, existential horror can be easily confused with a lack of energy.

Still, White Noise ’s first act is filled with the kind of snappy, overlapping dialogue Baumbach excels at. Jack fends off the sarcastic children in his blended family, works to learn German to lend legitimacy to his post as a professor of “Hitler studies,” and assists his fellow academic Murray Siskind (Cheadle), who’s attempting to launch a similar department centered on Elvis Presley. In one virtuoso sequence, Jack and Murray deliver simultaneous Hitler and Elvis lectures to the same rapt audience, trading back and forth on two very different 20th-century personality cults. Baumbach’s visual fluidity, and his camera’s awed dance around the lecture hall, is a joy to behold, given that he’s tended to work on a smaller scale.

That sequence crosscuts with a train accident that releases a deadly cloud of chemicals into the atmosphere—the catastrophic “airborne toxic event” that makes all of Jack and Babette’s fears of mortality suddenly feel much more urgent. Here, the film comes alive beyond its knowing satire; Baumbach wisely makes the ensuing terror a massive, nearly hour-long set piece—by far his loftiest thrill ride yet. The Gladney family watches the news with mounting concern, and then eventually hits the road along with everyone else in town. After getting caught in a miserably long traffic jam, they proceed to a quarantine center, where every directive from the government is as baffling as it is hopelessly mismanaged. It’s funny and surprisingly unnerving stuff.

The film also manages to feel contemporary without ever dropping the throwback aesthetic. Baumbach knows he’s making this movie for an audience that has suffered its own airborne toxic event, and he brings out little panicked details that ring uncomfortably true. Jack’s initial efforts to downplay the size of the disaster, both to reassure his children and himself, are heartbreakingly relatable. Though much of the ensuing drama pokes fun at Jack’s absurd efforts to be the family’s protective alpha male, Driver is terrific at conveying the joke without entirely losing his character to it.

White Noise ’s final act, in which the Gladneys try to return to their normal lives, is the toughest knot to untangle. For its challenging conclusion, the book intentionally goes inward, delving further into Jack and Babette’s insecurities. Baumbach, however, can’t switch from the film’s exaggerated tone to something more personal. The last showdown is loaded with sentiment but still painfully arch, which is probably why the film should be remembered simply as a curiosity—a fascinating adaptation that cannot overcome the scathing ridicule built into its source material. In this potentially waning age of prestige projects underwritten by Netflix, I certainly understand why Baumbach leapt to the challenge of making White Noise . Unfortunately, a graceful ending eluded him.

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White Noise review – Don DeLillo adaptation is a blackly comic blast

DeLillo’s novel of campus larks and eco dread has long been ogled by Hollywood. Now it gets an elegant, droll treatment from Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig

N oah Baumbach’s terrifically stylish movie, adapted by him from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, is a deadpan comedy of catastrophisation, a meditation on western prosperity and its discontents, its anxieties, its intellectual satiety. It’s a sensuous apocalyptic reverie founded on the assumption that nothing can really go wrong – or can it? Could it be that our preoccupations with ecological disaster are not played out in the service of rational pre-emptive measures, but irrational occult fears, supernatural inoculations against death?

DeLillo’s garrulous and witty novel of ideas has been hungered after by film-makers for nearly 40 years (Emma Cline even wrote a short story called White Noise in 2020 about Harvey Weinstein hoping to reclaim respectability by making a DeLillo movie.) Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

His film amplifies not merely the book’s richness as a period piece which speaks of the trendy zeitgeistiness of postmodernism on the American campus, but how prescient it is about the fears of the present day. The horror of the American suburban heartland in the face of the poisonous chemical cloud floating overhead - the “airborne toxic event” – feels like an address to Covid and the lockdown, and making uneasy, normalising accommodations with this pandemic.

And it is about an obsession with the growing ubiquity of information and interpretation, the availability of data that show one thing and apparently equally valid data that show the opposite. This is the white noise of ersatz fact: the fizz of bad television reception in which conspiracy and fake news takes root: a particulate formless blur. When I first read the novel I thought of the thing we used to as kids: place your face very close to the TV screen while a programme was on to see nothing but the tiny pixels.

Adam Driver plays a midwestern academic in the liberal arts called Jack Gladney, middle-aged and given what I thought was a fake pot belly but in one scene in his doctor’s treatment room he has his shirt off, revealing a paunch. Greta Gerwig plays Babette, his amiable distracted wife – both divorcees, they preside over a lively household of annoyingly precocious children and stepchildren.

Jack is America’s leading light in the world of the strangely preposterous discipline of Hitler Studies (Gladney speaks no German) an ahistorical technique of deconstructing the iconography of Hitler without being overwhelmed by or even necessarily aware of the tragic and horrendous context. Among its other premonitions, the story foresees the “end of history” briefly and modishly celebrated in the west with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jack’s colleague Murray Siskind (drolly played by Don Cheadle) is hoping to do for Elvis what Jack has done with Hitler and a big set piece has the two men delivering an ingenious (and flippant and insouciantly provocative) analysis of Elvis and Hitler at the same time. Slavoj Žižek has nothing on these guys.

Jack and Babette are content in an uneasy way, dramatised by time-honoured movie visits to the dreamy, affectless giant supermarket which is incidentally the site of a gloriously choreographed closing credit sequence. But Jack has worries. Babette has symptoms of what appear to be early onset dementia: she also seems to be addicted to a mysterious drug called Dylar, empty bottles of which appear in the trash. Without Google, Jack and his children have no choice but to ask academic colleagues and comb medical textbooks to find out what on earth “Dylar” is and what its dangers are. (In a similarly pre-YouTube state, the kids are obsessed with plane crash footage on the TV news, waiting impatiently for it to be shown.)

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And then the great crash happens – an environmental disaster caused by a Jack Daniel’s-swigging truck driver transporting oceans of gasoline crashing into a train transporting volatile toxic waste. (We have already seen Murray giving an amusing lecture on how the car crash in American cinema is an essentially light-hearted genre.) The resulting poison cloud causes them to leave their homes, an exodus involving a wonderfully surreal scene in which the station wagon drifts down a swollen river.

This bizarre freak occurrence that nonetheless exposes Jack to airborne toxins, which he discovers from maddeningly unreliable sources may well kill him in a couple of decades. True or not, this claim has been a way for Jack to realise he is going to die. And Babette too is afraid of her own death. Death is the film’s stratum of seriousness beneath the campus crisis and marital comedy – death is the one inescapable real thing among all the rumour and surmise: the film shows the characters simultaneously afraid of death but holding to it as the single guarantee of certainty in their lives.

Jack and Babette’s bizarre lives – a knight’s-move away from reality – are too strange to be sympathised with, for all the Spielbergian family chatter in the kitchen. But they are there to be to marvelled at. It is such a fascinating, invigorating spectacle.

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‘White Noise’: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s American Nightmare

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

What exactly is Noah Baumbach up to in White Noise ? The movie, which received a very limited theatrical release ahead of premiering December 30 on Netflix , is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s canonical postmodern novel from 1985. It’s been an intriguing prospect since it was announced because the celebrated writer/director would, at face value, seem to be a mismatch for the material. Baumbach’s milieu has tended to belong less to the eerily affected, consumerist crisis-world of DeLillo’s book than to the world of people who’d feel an obligation to have read that book. White Noise makes more sense as a book you can expect to see on Baumbach characters’ shelves.

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Like Marriage Story , White Noise stars Adam Driver . He plays Professor Jack Gladney, a scholar of Nazi Studies who cannot speak German. (He’s working on it.) He is, among other things, a man with Hitler on the mind, sharing with that monster a penchant for public performance, for taking his audience to church, in his own way. The robe, the Dr. Strangelove glasses: he’s as much an actor as a scholar. He’s also a family man. His wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), is a bubbly woman with a bubbly name, crinkle-curled half to death, with enough smarts to keep up with Jack and enough of a handle on reality to seem comparatively normal. Babette has been having memory problems. The Gladneys’ too-clever quartet of kids have noticed Babette sneaking off to take a mysterious drug named Dylar (evoking the synthetic material Mylar) that may either be the solution or the cause of those problems — it’s hard to say. They make for a funny little family unit, the Gladneys, living well in a professor’s house, in a college town, volleying back and forth through concerns both hyper-rational and completely normal, living lives flooded with brand-name products that Baumbach’s 35mm anamorphic frames take care to arrange, notice and announce as loudly and often as possible.

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Baumbach wiggles his way into that tension by rendering White Noise into a mashup of popular American Eighties styles, both high and low: the popcorny ensemble adventure, the sitcom, the Reagan-era adult prestige drama. He’s faithful enough to the shape and feel of those styles for us to notice not only when he moves between them, but for us to recognize that we, too, are a step removed from reality. We aren’t watching a simple, nostalgic tribute to the Eighties. We’re watching a movie that’s just off-center enough, just willing enough to announce itself as an approximation, that the era feels like a distant but easily consumed media memory. Even the disastrous toxic cloud that confronts this family feels referential. It’s sort of beautiful: astonishingly gloomy, a roiling gray mess with pink-purple shocks of lightning stuttering through it. We’re watching a movie called White Noise . But that cloud is straight out of Ghostbusters . 

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Baumbach overreaches in White Noise . The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured. Even a captivating monologue-confession by Gerwig, which anchors the dreary latter half of the movie, can’t quite push the project out of its sudden snooziness, a long spell where the kinetic sense of talk gets purposefully tamped down. There are ideas in the movie’s most spectacular failures, nevertheless. They aren’t always DeLillo’s ideas, to the extent that this is even a reasonable expectation. But the movie is always doing something — even if it isn’t always onto something. 

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White noise, common sense media reviewers.

Ambitious but uneven drama has guns, crashes, more.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Touches on many themes, although none very deeply,

Characters mostly just blunder through their days,

Main characters are a heteronormative White family

Guns and shooting. Characters are shot, with blood

Dialogue describing an affair. Kissing. Strong sex

Infrequent dialogue includes uses of "f--k," "s--t

Many brands shown throughout, especially in superm

Truck driver who appears drunk crashes truck while

Parents need to know that White Noise is a drama adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 acclaimed (and deemed "unfilmable") novel. It tackles many serious themes -- including climate change, consumerism, drug use, and more -- and is presented in a highly artificial style. Violence includes guns and shooting, some…

Positive Messages

Touches on many themes, although none very deeply, including climate change, consumerism, quality of education, drug use/dependence, and mortality.

Positive Role Models

Characters mostly just blunder through their days, making mistakes, making unwise choices, occasionally making it through.

Diverse Representations

Main characters are a heteronormative White family. Some professors at the main character's college are Black, including a Black woman chemist. At least two Black characters, while certainly secondary, have personality and agency.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting. Characters are shot, with blood spurts and bloody wounds. Bleeding victim dragged on carpet and loaded into car. Huge crash: Delivery truck smashes into train. Car chase, with pedestrians struck. Various car crashes. More images of car crashes from various films/shows. Creepy dream sequences include a scary figure, characters smothered in bedsheets, plucking flesh from face, etc. Scary, creeping, toxic cloud. Characters pushing and shoving. A drop of raw meat spatters on a person's face at a butcher counter.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Dialogue describing an affair. Kissing. Strong sex-related dialogue. Pornographic novels shown. Sex workers shown. Crude drawing of naked woman, very briefly seen in trash.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent dialogue includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "piss," "crotch," "dumb."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Many brands shown throughout, especially in supermarket scenes (some specifically from the 1980s): Coca-Cola, Pepsi, KFC, Velveeta, Glass Plus, Pringles, Carefree gum, Sunny Delight, Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Sprite, Jack Daniels, Shell gas station, Yoo-hoo, Brillo pads, Doritos, Ritz crackers, etc. Radio ad for Eggo waffles.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Truck driver who appears drunk crashes truck while reaching for bottle of Jack Daniels. Character appears to be addicted to fictitious pill "Dylar." Frequent cigarette smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that White Noise is a drama adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 acclaimed (and deemed "unfilmable") novel. It tackles many serious themes -- including climate change, consumerism, drug use, and more -- and is presented in a highly artificial style. Violence includes guns and shooting, some blood, and lots of vehicle crashes. There's also creepy, dream-like imagery and a threatening toxic cloud. Characters exchange sex-related dialogue, and there's kissing and a collection of pornographic novels. Infrequent language includes a few uses of "f--k," "s--t," and "piss." Characters smoke cigarettes, one appears to have a dependency on a fictitious pill, and a truck driver seems drunk, reaching for a bottle of Jack Daniels while driving. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

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• Parents say
• Kids say (2)

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

In WHITE NOISE, it's the 1980s, and Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) is a professor of Hitler studies, while his wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), leads exercise classes for seniors. They're both on their fourth marriages and have amassed several children between them. Their lives are chaotic but happy, especially when they visit their town's massive, shiny new supermarket. Then, after a delivery truck crashes into a train and releases an "airborne toxic event," the family must evacuate, leading to a series of hectic adventures, as well as Jack's possible exposure to the deadly stuff. Returning home, Jack tries to get to the bottom of Babette's sporadic memory loss, which may be linked to the mysterious pills she's been taking on the sly.

Is It Any Good?

A far cry from Noah Baumbach 's usual talky character pieces, this adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel is big, ambitious, bizarre, wildly uneven, sporadically funny, and weirdly worth seeing. Those familiar with the book (which was long considered "unfilmable") may have a leg up on others, especially since White Noise features long stretches of blocky chunks of artificial-sounding dialogue that careen up against one another, creating a cacophonous soundscape. But it also starts with a lecture by Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) about the beauty of car crashes that's flat-out hilarious. (In one scene, the movie pays film-nerd homage to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Week End , with its famous tracking shot full of stalled, ruined traffic.)

White Noise bounces back and forth between dialogue-heavy scenes -- including a verbose back-and-forth lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis -- and FX-laden sequences like a huge train wreck and a car chase scene. It seems to want to say a great deal, from the futility of the education system to the ridiculousness of consumerism and our overreliance on medication, but nothing hits very hard; nothing hits home. And Baumbach tries like crazy to be a "visual" director here, with poetic camera moves and pinwheeling shots around a room. But every so often, some odd combination of things feels just right, whether it be a sublime exchange between characters or a satisfying cut between shots. However, nothing is as totally wonderful as the end credits sequence: a musical number in a supermarket, with pastel colors popping and Andre 3000 from OutKast shimmying with a box of cookies. That alone is worth seeing twice.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about White Noise 's depiction of smoking and drug use . Are they glamorized? What are the consequences? Why is that important?

What role does violence play in the story?

What does the movie have to say about consumerism ? What do you think the filmmakers intended by showing so many brand-name products on-screen?

How does the movie address climate change? Could the toxic event have been prevented? Did the characters learn from it?

How does the movie differ from the novel, if you've read it? How is it similar? How is this story from the 1980s still relevant today?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 25, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : December 30, 2022
• Cast : Adam Driver , Greta Gerwig , Don Cheadle
• Director : Noah Baumbach
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : brief violence and language
• Last updated : March 9, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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White Noise

Where to watch.

Watch White Noise with a subscription on Prime Video, rent on Fandango at Home, or buy on Fandango at Home.

What to Know

While there are some built-in scares, the movie is muddled and unsatisfying.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Geoffrey Sax

Michael Keaton

Jonathan Rivers

Chandra West

Anna Rivers

Deborah Kara Unger

Ian McNeice

Raymond Price

Sarah Strange

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Was ‘Poolman’ Written With Crayons? Chris Pine Is a Hunk, Not a Director

Surely, you hope, this turkey will eventually come to life. surely, you think, with one eye glancing at the exit door, it will turn out to be about something. but all hopes are eclipsed by its idiotic, self-indulgent nothingness..

During its catastrophic impact on the film industry, the recent Covid shutdowns and union strikes put a lot of actors out of work, driving them to change career goals and create their own projects—never a good idea if you ask me. Now, the results of all that desperation are polluting marquees everywhere while the world waits for the panic to return to normal. The worst offense among many is a horror called Poolman, a stinker that marks the hopeless directorial debut of Hollywood heartthrob Chris Pine , who also wrote the idiotic screenplay. It was shot in 22 days and looks it. Not only is it the worst movie I have seen this year, this dog is one of the worst movies ever made.

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Pine plays a brain-dead rebel who lives on the outskirts of society in a trailer, cleans stagnant swimming pools, and models himself after the Big Lebowski. His grandiose goal is to disrupt Los Angeles City Council meetings in outrageous costumes while pretending to improve the environment, re-design the city, and write a documentary about urban renewal, cataloging reams of obvious dementia, which he mails to Erin Brockovich . At night, he frequents seedy bars where he orders egg creams with cinnamon sprinkles. For character depth, he believes he’s being stalked by a tree and talks to lizards. Weaving in and out of this bilge is a distinguished cast of confused supporters that includes Jennifer Jason Leigh as a pilates instructor, Danny DeVito as a washed-up director who uncovers a dangerous political conspiracy, and—believe it or not— Annette Bening , who doesn’t need the money. She must be doing somebody a favor. She plays Devito’s wife and the pool cleaner’s psychiatrist. In L.A., the shrinks are even crazier than their clients. Following her sensational Oscar-nominated role as the renowned swimming champion in last year’s Nyad with this time-waster demands an explanation. 

As an actor, Pine has, in the past, turned in a few unexceptional but acceptably workmanlike performances in such films as Hell or High Water , Honor Among Thieves and Into the Woods. In this disaster, he doesn’t make one word of sense, and I’m not exaggerating. As a director, he doesn’t know where to put the closeup of a foot. As a writer, his screenplay, which seems to have been written by chimpanzees with purple Crayolas, contains the worst line of the decade: “People like me eat people like you. But you’re not even an appetizer. You’re an amuse-bouche. ” Even after a moronic muttering like that, one review I read described Poolman as a “wry spin on Chinatown”.  Sure, like Rocky played by Siamese twins.

Surely, you hope, this turkey will eventually come to life. Surely, you think, with one eye glancing at the exit door, it will turn out to be about something. But all hopes are eclipsed by its idiotic, self-indulgent nothingness. One thing is certain: Chris Pine is one of the best-looking of Hollywood’s breed of hunky new hotties. But he even trashes his biggest asset, playing most of Poolman in a bikini with hair down to his chest and a shaggy, hirsute white beard that makes him look like a stoner Santa Claus. I advise him to preserve his movie-star profile for future posterity in a museum where fans can admire his Technicolor countenance for the way Hollywood hunks used to look after graduation from the Nautilus School of Dramatic Art. Nobody is apt to remember him as a director.

• SEE ALSO : Will Keen On Playing Vladimir Putin On Broadway in ‘Patriots’

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How to Thrive as You Age

Got tinnitus a device that tickles the tongue helps this musician find relief.

Allison Aubrey

After using the Lenire device for an hour each day for 12 weeks, Victoria Banks says her tinnitus is "barely noticeable." David Petrelli/Victoria Banks hide caption

After using the Lenire device for an hour each day for 12 weeks, Victoria Banks says her tinnitus is "barely noticeable."

Imagine if every moment is filled with a high-pitched buzz or ring that you can't turn off.

More than 25 million adults in the U.S., have a condition called tinnitus, according to the American Tinnitus Association. It can be stressful, even panic-inducing and difficult to manage. Dozens of factors can contribute to the onset of tinnitus, including hearing loss, exposure to loud noise or a viral illness.

There's no cure, but there are a range of strategies to reduce the symptoms and make it less bothersome, including hearing aids, mindfulness therapy , and one newer option – a device approved by the FDA to treat tinnitus using electrical stimulation of the tongue.

The device has helped Victoria Banks, a singer and songwriter in Nashville, Tenn., who developed tinnitus about three years ago.

"The noise in my head felt like a bunch of cicadas," Banks says. "It was terrifying." The buzz made it difficult for her to sing and listen to music. "It can be absolutely debilitating," she says.

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Tinnitus bothers millions of americans. here's how to turn down the noise.

Banks tried taking dietary supplements , but those didn't help. She also stepped up exercise, but that didn't bring relief either. Then she read about a device called Lenire, which was approved by the FDA in March 2023. It includes a plastic mouthpiece with stainless steel electrodes that electrically stimulate the tongue. It is the first device of its kind to be approved for tinnitus.

"This had worked for other people, and I thought I'm willing to try anything at this point," Banks recalls.

She sought out audiologist Brian Fligor, who treats severe cases of tinnitus in the Boston area. Fligor was impressed by the results of a clinical trial that found 84% of participants who tried Lenire experienced a significant reduction in symptoms. He became one of the first providers in the U.S. to use the device with his patients. Fligor also served on an advisory panel assembled by the company who developed it.

"A good candidate for this device is somebody who's had tinnitus for at least three months," Fligor says, emphasizing that people should be evaluated first to make sure there's not an underlying medical issue.

Tinnitus often accompanies hearing loss, but Victoria Banks' hearing was fine and she had no other medical issue, so she was a good candidate.

Banks used the device for an hour each day for 12 weeks. During the hour-long sessions, the electrical stimulation "tickles" the tongue, she says. In addition, the device includes a set of headphones that play a series of tones and ocean-wave sounds.

The device works, in part, by shifting the brain's attention away from the buzz. We're wired to focus on important information coming into our brains, Fligor says. Think of it as a spotlight at a show pointed at the most important thing on the stage. "When you have tinnitus and you're frustrated or angry or scared by it, that spotlight gets really strong and focused on the tinnitus," Fligor says.

"It's the combination of what you're feeling through the nerves in your tongue and what you're hearing through your ears happening in synchrony that causes the spotlight in your brain to not be so stuck on the tinnitus," Fligor explains.

A clinical trial found 84% of people who used the device experienced a significant reduction in symptoms. Brian Fligor hide caption

A clinical trial found 84% of people who used the device experienced a significant reduction in symptoms.

"It unsticks your spotlight" and helps desensitize people to the perceived noise that their tinnitus creates, he says.

Banks says the ringing in her ears did not completely disappear, but now it's barely noticeable on most days.

"It's kind of like if I lived near a waterfall and the waterfall was constantly going," she says. Over time, the waterfall sound fades out of consciousness.

"My brain is now focusing on other things," and the buzz is no longer so distracting. She's back to listening to music, writing music, and performing music." I'm doing all of those things," she says.

When the buzz comes back into focus, Banks says a refresher session with the device helps.

A clinical trial found that 84% of people who tried Lenire , saw significant improvements in their condition. To measure changes, the participants took a questionnaire that asked them to rate how much tinnitus was impacting their sleep, sense of control, feelings of well-being and quality of life. After 12 weeks of using the device, participants improved by an average of 14 points.

"Where this device fits into the big picture, is that it's not a cure-all, but it's quickly become my go-to," for people who do not respond to other ways of managing tinnitus, Fligor says.

One down-side is the cost. Banks paid about $4,000 for the Lenire device, and insurance doesn't cover it. She put the expense on her credit card and paid it off gradually.

Fligor hopes that as the evidence of its effectiveness accumulates, insurers will begin to cover it. Despite the cost, more than 80% of participants in the clinical trial said they would recommend the device to a friend with tinnitus.

But, it's unclear how long the benefits last. Clinical trials have only evaluated Lenire over a 1-year period. "How durable are the effects? We don't really know yet," says audiologist Marc Fagelson, the scientific advisory committee chair of the American Tinnitus Association. He says research is promising but there's still more to learn.

Fagelson says the first step he takes with his patients is an evaluation for hearing loss. Research shows that hearing aids can be an effective treatment for tinnitus among people who have both tinnitus and hearing loss, which is much more common among older adults. An estimated one-third of adults 65 years of age and older who have hearing loss, also have tinnitus.

"We do see a lot of patients, even with very mild loss, who benefit from hearing aids," Fagelson says, but in his experience it's about 50-50 in terms of improving tinnitus. Often, he says people with tinnitus need to explore options beyond hearing aids.

Bruce Freeman , a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, says he's benefitted from both hearing aids and Lenire. He was fitted for the device in Ireland where it was developed, before it was available in the U.S.

Freeman agrees that the ringing never truly disappears, but the device has helped him manage the condition. He describes the sounds that play through the device headphones as very calming and "almost hypnotic" and combined with the tongue vibration, it's helped desensitize him to the ring.

Freeman – who is a research scientist – says he's impressed with the results of research, including a study published in Nature, Scientific Reports that points to significant improvements among clinical trial participants with tinnitus.

Freeman experienced a return of his symptoms when he stopped using the device. "Without it the tinnitus got worse," he says. Then, when he resumed use, it improved.

Freeman believes his long-term exposure to noisy instruments in his research laboratory may have played a role in his condition, and also a neck injury from a bicycle accident that fractured his vertebra. "All of those things converged," he says.

Freeman has developed several habits that help keep the high-pitched ring out of his consciousness and maintain good health. "One thing that does wonders is swimming," he says, pointing to the swooshing sound of water in his ears. "That's a form of mindfulness," he explains.

When it comes to the ring of tinnitus, "it comes and goes," Freeman says. For now, it has subsided into the background, he told me with a sense of relief. "The last two years have been great," he says – a combination of the device, hearing aids and the mindfulness that comes from a swim.

This story was edited by Jane Greenhalgh

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Back to Black

The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

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• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes

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