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There’s a strong argument to be made that the toxic right-wing figures profiled in this documentary are not worthy of such screen-time. Not just because other recent documentaries have detailed their lives and ideologies, but because what they preach, and what they represent, needs as few platforms as possible. Nor is the idea of intellectualizing these people going to be “interesting” to many who are directly threatened by open talk about a white ethnostate, or the branding of immigration as an "invasion." That’s the kind of headache you get with this first documentary from The Atlantic , which goes by the name "White Noise" but nonetheless lets its racist grifters be heard.

“White Noise” is a documentary that hopes the viewer has the same curiosities that the filmmakers did, in following these lives for the sake of seeing what's next. The beginning is a "how-did-they-get-that" moment—a Halloween party, with alt-right figures dressed in costumes different from the ones they wear for their noxious line of work. But the film is not so much about interrogating the alt-right as it is humanizing them through observation, and following them from Trump’s emboldening victory in 2016 to the end of 2019, in which they all seem to be worn down from living a life of hate. One ideology’s virulent demagogue is the opposite ideology’s middling documentary subject.

Debut director Daniel Lombroso doesn’t have a style so much as an approach, in that he seeks to capture these people in the candid moments in between inflammatory public appearances. It’s common for “White Noise” to show them making some speech that comes with equal scrutiny and security detail, and leaving in an Uber, decompressing to the camera. Throughout, the documentary shows only some cracks in their performative nature, the moments in which someone really questioning them leaves them shaken. It becomes clear that these alt-right figureheads are emboldened by social media attention, and wouldn’t exist without an audience.

What this documentary does not present is a sense of why the message takes hold, or the history that has enabled in it. In its close following of the messengers in the present, there’s only a fractured idea of the movement, and a bigger picture that is more important than just these three leaders. The idea of alt-right culture in a larger sense only comes from cameos—the non-FOX networks that host them (like OAN, The Blaze), the gobsmacked fans they meet in person, the brief and disturbing footage of white young men in white clothes walking to white vans.

As “White Noise” tends to lag, it becomes haunted by the James Baldwin quote it presents at the beginning: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Though that stance is right on the money when it comes to hatred, Lombroso does not deal with such an emotional state until the last 15 minutes or so. Even then, as everyone seems to have run out of hate to sell, "White Noise" says little about its movement except showing that to stay grifting, you have to adapt.

The documentary does provide a strong sense of the domino effect in such ideology, in that it clearly connects mass shootings from around the world to the tweets fired out by those who are front and center here. But when it comes the filmmakers asking these people if they take any responsibility for their rhetoric, the figures back away. Of course they don’t, and such frustrating toothlessness becomes endemic of the project overall. Accountability is not in the script for the characters they've made, and in the few instances in “White Noise” looks to press back against the people who have given them so much access, it also gives them an easy way out.

Oh, and the movie is about misogynist pill salesman Mike Cernovich, xenophobic vlogger Lauren Southern, and white supremacist Richard Spencer . In the scope of America’s growth, may their legacies be a mere footnote.

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Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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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.

By Owen Gleiberman

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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: 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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In a scene from “White Noise,” several members of the Gladney family are in a room lit by greenish-yellow light. The father, at center, wears a busy patterned shirt.

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 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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Noah baumbach's 'white noise' adaptation is brave, even if not entirely successful.

John Powers

Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy appear in Noah Baumbach's White Noise. Wilson Webb /Netflix hide caption

Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy appear in Noah Baumbach's White Noise.

These are frustrating days for ambitious American filmmakers. Critics and older filmgoers bemoan that our screens offer little more than blockbuster franchises and cheap horror pictures. Yet when directors try to make something different and daring, they usually get thumped if they don't completely succeed.

Take the new Netflix film White Noise , the latest film from Noah Baumbach, best known for movies like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story . The movie is adapted from Don DeLillo 's 1985 novel, a cool, dazzling book shot through with so many shifting ironies that virtually every reviewer has described it as unfilmable.

Well, Baumbach has filmed it, and though I can't call his adaptation a triumph, a lot of the reviews strike me as being ungenerous to a brave attempt. White Noise is bursting with fun things to watch. And though the story takes place in the 1980s, it tackles present day preoccupations: human-caused disaster, media saturation, drug addiction and consumerism.

Director Noah Baumbach tackles misinformation in 'White Noise,' wryly

A deglamorized Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, a professor in the popular department of Hitler Studies, a program he invented not because he admires der Führer but because Hitler is a strong brand in the intellectual marketplace.

Jack lives in a cozy college town, along with his slightly dippy fourth wife, Babette — played by Greta Gerwig with big, bouncy curls — and their kids from assorted marriages. Whether the Gladneys are all having breakfast or driving in their station wagon, their scenes crackle with the sometimes inane, sometimes pointed texture of family crosstalk.

Their story unfolds in three very different chapters, all tinged with satire. The first part lays out the Gladney's life. In the second, disaster-film chapter, a calamitous train wreck menaces their town with a so-called "airborne toxic event," whose foreboding black cloud forces them to flee to a camp for evacuees. Once that gets sorted out, the noirish third chapter tells the story of Babette's use of a mysterious drug called Dylar and the violence it engenders.

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Gerwig, baumbach poke at post-college pangs.

While this may make White Noise sound dauntingly dark, its default tone is actually jaunty, if ironically so. Baumbach creates scenes that recall popular TV shows like The Simpsons and Stranger Things , and in Don Cheadle 's character, a professor named Murray, you get an upbeat version of a Greek chorus who sounds happy as a clam no matter what he's discussing. In a great scene set in a classroom, Murray talks about the death of Elvis Presley , and, as in an academic battle of the bands, Jack tries to top him with the fall of Hitler.

Although Baumbach has a real gift for domestic realism, he's always been drawn to the audacity of the French New Wave. He loves its formal iconoclasm and juxtaposition of tones, from the lyrical to the intellectual to the silly. He attempts such a tonal collage here, and I regret to say, that his White Noise doesn't hold together as well as DeLillo's.

In fact, watching White Noise reminds me a bit of watching the work of the New Wave's greatest genius, Jean-Luc Godard , who was, as it happens, a huge influence on DeLillo. Godard's movies always tended to shuffle brilliant scenes with sections that leave you weak with boredom. You get the same unevenness here, but Baumbach is less intimidating than Godard or DeLillo, neither of whom ever worried about making the audience happy. Baumbach keeps White Noise on the lighter, less political side of the ledger, as in the joyous supermarket finale that's miles from DeLillo's trademark sense of paranoia and dread.

Laced with good jokes, the movie brims with terrific moments, be it Murray's magnificent riff on Hollywood car crashes — which he sees as an expression of American optimism — or the sly sequence at the evacuee camp that seems to come from a missing movie by Baumbach's friend and collaborator, Wes Anderson .

Early on, Jack and Babette have a talk in which each admits that they hope they die before the other. It's partly funny, partly not. And it underscores White Noise 's obsession with death, the fear of dying, and especially the countless ways we fend off that fear — by turning catastrophes into media spectacles, by reducing the genocidal Hitler to a kind of pop icon, by smoothing ourselves out with dodgy drugs and by pretending that the disasters we see on TV could never hit us. And, if all else fails, the movie assures us, we can always go shopping.

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White Noise Reviews

Instead of something that speaks directly to the present, it’s a period piece... There’s not much fun in a film where everyone’s just looking at Twitter. But without its eerie relevance, it’s not quite clear why this film even exists.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

At its best, Noah Baumbach’s impressive and thoroughly decent adaptation of White Noise interestingly discusses people’s relatable ownership of secrets yet complete inability to internalize them.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The banter and responses between Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig were so sharp, witty, and brilliant that if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they were married in real life.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

Not only do these numerous subplots fail to cohere into an actual story, but each is approached with such detachment that it feels like you're watching them unfold through several miles of plexiglass via a telescope from the other side of the galaxy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 16, 2023

Fans unfamiliar with the novel may be disappointed that the film does not feel like a Baumbach film – without credits, it could be mistaken for Wes Anderson – and find the story pulls punches in the end when it feel like more oomph is needed.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The movie limits itself to its title, that is, it remains within the "noise" and doesn't get to the "background" of the themes it satirizes, specifically fear. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

Admirers of Baumbach will smile at the ways in which White Noise embodies his longtime preoccupations and simultaneously points toward bold new possibilities...

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

White Noise is a mumblecore indie film with a Spielbergian disaster at its core. It’s grander than anything Baumbach has done before, and may likely do again. The film is a biting satire of our times, plucked out of the 1980s.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

There might be occasions where you see Bambach struggling with the hefty source material, but, in conclusion, he delivers a worthy adaptation filled with empathy and dismay, both in captivating equal measures.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

White Noise is a film that absolutely shouldn’t work, and yet it does.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2023

While frustrating that it cant’ quite replicate the enjoyable messiness of its first hour across its whole runtime, White Noise is an enjoyable swing from all involved, a complete departure from Noah Baumbach’s previous work

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2023

An unforgettable movie about family, disasters, consumerism, addiction, and finding meaning in surprising places.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 28, 2023

White Noise pretends to depict America in the middle of a waking nightmare, but it’s a privileged person’s nightmare.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2023

something of a mess, but in a great, enthralling, engaging kind of way

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2023

Even amid the hijinks, an affecting score from Danny Elfman, and the instantly catchy LCD Soundsystem song that ties the chaos together, White Noise can’t sustain itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2023

DeLillo’s story may be almost 40 years old, but in the wake of the pandemic it has taken on a new resonance.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2023

To call ‘White Noise’ unconventional is to put it, well, mildly. It is a fragmented mess of a plot, yes. It is wildly a spectacle, yes.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 14, 2023

White Noise can seem both annoyingly arch and almost adorably naïve. Viewer mileage may vary, but for me it was a hard slog.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

What was considered over-the-top crazy in 1985 is now just stuff that happens in everyday life.

Full Review | Jan 27, 2023

This bold, playful survey of existential malaise via middle-class suburbia and academia overflows with life, death, consumerism and the cacophony of chaos echoing through our every living moment.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2023

Cast & crew
User reviews

White Noise

Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of h... Read all Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world.

Noah Baumbach
Don DeLillo
Adam Driver
Greta Gerwig
Don Cheadle
465 User reviews
205 Critic reviews
66 Metascore
3 wins & 24 nominations

College on the Hill
(as Wickham Bermingham)

(as Matthew Williams)

Student in Jack's Class
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia This is Noah Baumbach 's first time writing and directing a book-to-screen adaptation, and only his second adaptation after co-writing the screenplay for Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) .
Goofs In the opening scene, many vehicles featured in Murray's crash sequence reel are from the 1990s and 2000s, whereas White Noise takes place in the 1980s.

Jack : But out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope.

Crazy credits There is a scene at the end where the characters dance in a supermarket. As the credits start to roll, this sequence is played partially in reverse as the music continues to play normally.
Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: This Movie Saved My Life (and the one's that almost ruined it): Best and Worst of 2022 (2023)
Soundtracks Lincoln Portrait Written by Aaron Copland

User reviews 465

Oct 10, 2022
How long is White Noise? Powered by Alexa
December 30, 2022 (United States)
United States
United Kingdom
Official Netflix
ضوضاء بيضاء
Wellington, Ohio, USA (Storefronts are built out and set up for July filming)
BB Film Productions
Heyday Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$145,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 16 minutes

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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?

A car of screaming people in "White Noise"

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.

A family shopping in a grocery store in "White Noise"

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: Noah Baumbach’s Don DeLillo Adaptation Is Inspired — and Exasperating

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Netflix releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 25, with a streaming release to follow on Friday, December 30.

You might think it would be strange to see a mega-budget Noah Baumbach movie complete with CGI explosions, a Spielbergian kind of holy terror, and even one sadistically drawn-out jump-scare dream sequence, but the oddest thing about “ White Noise ” is its persistent sense of déjà vu . Not just the déjà vu of watching such a faithful adaptation of any Great American Novel — although there’s plenty of that — but also the déjà vu that’s supposedly caused by exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event at the center of Don DeLillo’s 1985 book, a prescient and enduringly tender Polaroid of our late capitalist society in which life has become indistinguishable from its own imitation, and death has become a thing that only happens to other people.

Fittingly, if not always to its credit, Baumbach’s film is split between seeming brand-new and all too familiar at the same time; equal parts inspired and exasperating, his “White Noise” is like hearing a sound and its echo all at once. At best, this adaptation uses that uncanniness to its advantage, leveraging its uniquely cinematic language to illustrate the role that movies play in creating the false memories that help distance us from the reality of our own demise (and contribute to the demise of our own reality).

At worst, Baumbach’s “White Noise” is made so wobbly by that uncanniness that it starts to feel as if it’s not an adaptation of DeLillo’s novel so much as an overworked distillation of its aura. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA isn’t in the movie because it becomes the movie itself: A picture of a picture that only allows us to see what others have already seen before. That’s what cinema is, of course, but that’s not all that it can be.

The touristic essence of Baumbach’s “White Noise” traces back to the filmmaker’s obvious affection for DeLillo’s writing, and to the many overlaps between their work: The affectless intermingling between love and cruelty, a shared penchant for what novelist Richard Powers refers to as “academic burlesque,” and a mutual understanding of the way that people cling to such language and crumbs of knowledge like driftwood to keep them from drowning in life’s chaos along with everyone else. Noah Baumbach has never written a character who wouldn’t lie to their doctor.

Outside of director adaptations like “Cosmopolis,” few movies have ever captured the author’s spirit better than Wes Anderson’s Baumbach-scripted “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the ethos of which — “We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts” — owes far more to DeLillo than it does to Roald Dahl. Ditto its forgiving take on the role of family in a consumer-driven civilization (“These apples look fake, but at least they’ve got stars on them”), and its supermarket dance finale, which Baumbach euphorically recreates at the end of “White Noise” with some help from LCD Soundsystem.

Remember the bit in “Greenberg” when Ben Stiller asks Chris Messina if his pool can overflow, only for Messina to snap: “Yes, the pool can fucking overflow!” Good luck thinking of anything else when professor Jack Gladney (a pot-bellied Adam Driver , sandpapering his signature ferality with a newly paternal softness) is evacuating his family away from the apocalyptic cloud of black chemicals that’s formed in the sky above their liberal college town. Played by a poodle-haired Greta Gerwig — inches away from going full Carol White — Jack’s fourth wife Babette comforts her 14-year-old stepson (Sam Nivola) that they won’t run out of gas. “There’s always extra,” she says. “How can there always be extra?,” the kid shoots back. Everybody knows they can’t just keep going forever, and yet modern life has made it so easy to believe that you will; no wonder this story’s flirtation with simulation theory has the whiff of wishful thinking.

DeLillo suggested that such belief was sustained by the ritualistic distancing from death; that America’s obsessions with shopping and spectacle, both of which achieved a new garishness during the Reagan era, are modern reactions to the same raw fear that has backstopped every religion since time immemorial. The low hum of the flourescent lights on aisle five helps muffle our mortal terror — so do the commercial jingles on TV (“Who wears short shorts?”) and the disaster footage the local news shares with us as soon as the ad breaks are over. Those other people are dead, which reinforces our faith that we are not like them. Jack teaches “Hitler studies” because nothing makes him feel safer than the belief that history’s most spectacular episode of dying is just behind him.

Professor Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ), Jack’s Elvis-obsessed colleague at the College-on-the-Hill, is addicted to car crash scenes in movies for much the same reason: To him, they are orgiastic monuments to life. Flaming shrines of naive innocence. He edits them into celebratory supercuts for his students, the faked carnage blurring into an explosive affirmation of real life. In what will prove to be one of his more radical deviations from DeLillo’s text, Baumbach refashions Suskind’s mid-book lecture (“I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism!”) into the electric prologue of this “White Noise,” setting the stage for a manic film of ideas that genuinely sympathizes with — and takes a certain giddiness in — the various coping mechanisms we use to ignore the deathward march of our own lives.

WHITE NOISE - Adam Driver (Jack). Cr: Wilson Webb/NETFLIX © 2022

Baumbach recognizes that spectacle has evolved since 1985, but one of the strengths of his “White Noise” is that he recognizes how little has changed about its role in society. Not only does this adaptation refuse to update DeLillo’s story — the film’s sublime costumes, sets, and lighting taking softly fetishistic pleasure in every teal windbreaker, halogen lamp, and noir-tinged sheet of “Paris, Texas”-inspired neon green — it seeks to return the text to a time before it was diffused by all of the fiction it predicted.

Baumbach burns through DeLillo’s plot (such as it is) in a hurry, the writer-director more focused on careening between dark comedy and light terror than he is on getting to know the characters who are forced to go along for the ride. He ditches entire branches of Jack’s family in order to savor the novel’s show-stopping moments; the lecture duel between Jack and Murray is shot with the same “you gotta see this!” glee and kineticism as the dojo scene in “The Matrix.”

We know that Jack and Babette are still horny for each other despite everything, that she takes mysterious pills called Dylar that seem to mess with her memory, and that they both feel safe for the time being because it’s pretty rare for upper-middle-class white parents to die while their kids are still young enough to live at home. Jack’s colleagues — a group that also features Jodie Turner-Smith and the newly appointed patron saint of fun supporting roles in mainstream art films, André Benjamin — are mostly there to offset the poignancy of Jack’s voiceover (cribbed verbatim from the book) and keep things from growing too serious.

One hundred and four pages flash by in about 33 minutes of proto-Baumbachian conniptions and banter — much of which feels straitjacketed by DeLillo’s writing, as if Baumbach’s scabrousness were losing a war against his love for the source material — a big jolt is mixed into the warning that “whatever relaxes you is dangerous,” and then a truck crashes into a rail car and releases a “Nope”-like cloud of death over Jack’s entire life. That’s when things get really interesting.

If the first act of “White Noise” feels like a work of expert-level pantomime, the similarly faithful second act somehow creates an energy all its own. Baumbach knows that DeLillo anticipated the likes of “The Matrix,” “The Truman Show,” and scads of other stories in which reality becomes a simulation of itself, but those aren’t the movies he wants to remind you of here. A crucial difference between the “White Noise” of 2022 and the “White Noise” of 1985 is that Baumbach has already seen the movies that DeLillo’s book helped to inspire, and that frees him to have some fun with this one.

WHITE NOISE - (L-R) Don Cheadle (Murray) and Adam Driver (Jack). Cr: Wilson Webb/NETFLIX © 2022

As Jack, Babette, and the four younger members of their blended brood (a terrific group that also includes Raffey Cassidy and May Nivola) attempt to flee the airborne toxic effect, trying to suss out how safe they should feel amid the traffic jam of other families trying to do the same thing, Baumbach switches to a register that we’ve never seen from him before. Suddenly we’re in “War of the Worlds” territory, complete with oodles of Spielberg Face and a menacing awe so artful and evocative that it feels more like the real thing than a commentary on it. Something I never thought I’d write about a Baumbach film: The CGI is fantastic.

The evacuation sequences viscerally convey the appeal of disaster movies by clinging to a character who refuses to accept that he’s in one (at least at first), or to acknowledge that death can still find him in a large crowd. Baumbach’s visual language ensures that we have no such trouble. We’ve seen “Independence Day,” “Deep Impact,” and enough films of its ilk to recognize what a massive disaster supposedly looks like, but Jack — living in 1985 — doesn’t have the same frame of reference. To him, his situation doesn’t feel like a movie, and so he’s slow to recognize it as a disaster (a phenomenon illustrated in the brilliant shot of a black cloud swallowing the glow of a Shell logo just above Jack’s shoulder). We have the opposite problem, and it epitomizes why “White Noise” may be even more relevant today than it was 37 years ago: When we reckon with a disaster that seems too much like a movie, we struggle to accept that it’s real. As a character puts it in the book, and possibly also in this film: “For most people there are only two places in the world: Where they live and their TV set.”

Baumbach has an absolute field day with this dissonance; the closer his characters veer towards danger, the more that Baumbach exaggerates the movie-ness of their existence. A dramatic car chase is shot like a scene from an ’80s road trip comedy like “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” complete with a slow-motion shot of the family station flying through the air. A climactic showdown in a seedy motel — the end of the Dylar affair — drips with De Palma, all the way down to an unmissable split-diopter shot.

It’s a good thing the movie’s semiotic pleasures are so pronounced, because the book’s more basic charms don’t quite survive the trip to the big screen (let alone the ride home to Netflix). That third act gunplay is typical of an adaptation that’s always smart and on edge, but seldom involving enough beyond that. DeLillo’s writing gives readers the space to see their own existential terror reflected back at them in the funhouse mirror of Jack’s absurd circumstances, but Baumbach’s “White Noise” — more externalized by default — proves too arch for our emotions to penetrate.

Baumbach’s film is so determined to feel like “White Noise” that it ends up wearing the novel like a costume, a sensation epitomized by its lead performance. Driver is far too young to play the 51-year-old Jack (even if 38 was the 51 of 1985), though his middle-aged cosplay contributes to the general air of simulacra. More difficult to excuse is the actor’s struggle to sell the journey of Jack’s epiphanies. Driver is so naturally wild with life that he never quite musters the latent fear needed to fuel his character through the first act; it’s the same reason why the self-possession Jack finds in the third act feels less earned than it does inevitable. It’s a fitting anchor for an adaptation that gets everything so right that you might yearn for the friction that comes with getting it wrong, or at least the tension that comes from pulling away.

It’s no coincidence that the film’s most ecstatic moments — the first scene, the last scene, and the Spielbergian chaos that runs down the middle — are also the ones that most deviate from the book. Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume. The sound of a beeping smoke alarm, perhaps.

“White Noise” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival . Netflix will release it in select theaters and on Netflix later this year.

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.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Noah Baumbach
Don DeLillo
Adam Driver
Venice film festival
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Venice film festival 2022

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Review: 'White Noise' is a sign of respect to a virtuoso but never completely breaks free

It’s Baumbach’s first constricted film.

To understand “White Noise,” the new Noah Baumbach movie now streaming on Netflix, extend the definition of the term to the clamor of the modern media world that distracts us from reality to clear a poison path to rampant consumerism.

Got that? No worries. In his first film adapted from another writer’s work (the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo), Baumbach (“Marriage Story,” “The Squid and the Whale”) starts us off easy with an absurdist comedy, set in Midwestern college town, where Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) heads the department of Hitler studies and joins his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), in raising their lively brood of four.

DeLillo's fiction, long thought unfilmable due to its literary themes and digressions, leaves Baumbach intellectually bloody but proudly unbowed.

In short, the movie doesn’t work as a whole, but there’s no denying the glints of brilliance that keep us riveted.

MORE: Review: The 10 best movies of 2022

Life is complacent comfort for the Gladney’s and their kids, a baby of their own and three from other marriages -- Babette’s daughter, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and Jack’s son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and daughter, Steffie (May Nivola). The last two are the gifted offspring of actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer.

PHOTO: Sam Nivola as Heinrich, Adam Driver as Jack, May Nivola as Steffie, Greta Gerwig as Babette, Dean Moore/Henry Moore as Wilder and Raffey Cassidy as Denise in White Noise.

Jack isn’t even bothered when his professor pal, Manny (a terrific Don Cheadle), who develops a class out of old movie car crashes, counters Jack’s career-making course on Hitler with his own lectures on Elvis.

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The academic spoofing ends when everyone takes to the road, evacuating in panic from an “airborne toxic event” that just might signal the end of days.

Though the film, like the book, stays rooted in the 1980s (no cellphones!), there’s a timely connection to COVID-19 intensified by the fact that the film was shot during the pandemic.

PHOTO: White Noise. (L to R) Adam Driver as Jack, Greta Gerwig as Babette, and Don Cheadle as Murray in White Noise. Cr. Wilson Webb/Netflix Â© 2022

Kudos to Baumbach’s vibrant cast for deepening characters who are little more than DeLillo mouthpieces in the book. As the pill-popping Babette, Gerwig makes something palpable and moving of thwarted ambition. And Driver, displaying a paunch and slumping posture, remains an actor of limitless range who actually brings flesh and spirit to an academic concept.

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Still, Baumbach’s honorable faithfulness to the novel that won DeLillo the National Book Award leaves his movie struggling between two mediums. When it comes to deconstructing existential dread, cinema is no match for the fullness of the page. At least it isn’t here.

PHOTO:Don Cheadle and Adam Driver star in the Netflix movie, 'White Noise'.

“White Noise” plays like a Baumbach collaboration with DeLillo, a sign of respect to a virtuoso. And I don’t mean this as a compliment. It’s Baumbach’s first constricted film, the one that never completely breaks free.

Except, of all places, in the end credits.

Unfolding in a supermarket where customers -- on a contact high from shelves overstuffed with brightly colored brand name junk food -- break into a song and dance sparked by “New Body Rhumba,” a fresh anthem from LCD Soundsystem.

The sequence is a blast and the scariest thing I’ve seen on film since George Romero set zombies loose at a shopping mall in 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead.” It’s also Baumbach breaking free of DeLillo to make his own kind of apocalyptic poetry. “White Noise,” which goes flooey more often than it hits the mark, needed more of that.

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Review: 'White Noise' is a sign of respect to a virtuoso but never completely breaks free

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DeLillo's fiction, long thought unfilmable due to its literary themes and digressions, leaves Baumbach intellectually bloody but proudly unbowed.

In short, the movie doesn’t work as a whole, but there’s no denying the glints of brilliance that keep us riveted.

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Dec 29, 2022

The academic spoofing ends when everyone takes to the road, evacuating in panic from an “airborne toxic event” that just might signal the end of days.

Though the film, like the book, stays rooted in the 1980s (no cellphones!), there’s a timely connection to COVID-19 intensified by the fact that the film was shot during the pandemic.

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Except, of all places, in the end credits.

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Netflix’s White Noise is the electric, ambitious, messy adaptation Don DeLillo’s epic novel deserves

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information may no longer be current.

White Noise. (L to R) Sam Nivola as Heinrich, Adam Driver as Jack, May Nivola as Steffie, Greta Gerwig as Babette, Dean Moore/Henry Moore as Wilder and Raffey Cassidy as Denise in White Noise. Cr. Wilson Webb/Netflix © 2022

Sam Nivola as Heinrich, Adam Driver as Jack, May Nivola as Steffie, Greta Gerwig as Babette, Dean Moore/Henry Moore as Wilder and Raffey Cassidy as Denise in White Noise. Wilson Webb/Netflix

White Noise
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Written by Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle
Classification R; 136 minutes
In select theatres Dec. 2, streaming on Netflix starting Dec. 30

Critic’s Pick

It all starts at the supermarket. In Noah Baumbach’s ambitious, thrilling and necessarily messy adaptation of Don DeLillo’s seminal postmodern novel White Noise , the local A&P grocery store is the be all and end all of the contemporary American psyche, at least circa 1985. “All the letters and numbers are here, all the colours of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases,” DeLillo wrote. “It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability.”

Along with his meticulous, magnificent production team, Baumbach deciphers, rearranges, peels, but also slices, dices and more (julienne fries!), stocking his onscreen A&P with all manner of resurrected brands of a slightly bygone era. Boxes of Sugar Smacks cereal, cans of Sanka, rainbow packets of Carefree gum, an aisle dedicated to all-white generic-brand items that recall the no-frills branding of Repo Man (or, for Canadians, the no-name No Frills): together these items of consumer culture constitute a fluorescent-bright comfort zone for the Gladney clan at the centre of White Noise .

There is college professor Jack (Adam Driver), the leading expert on “Hitler Studies.” There is his fourth wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), who fears death more than she loves Jack – and she loves her husband dearly, or at least enough to read to him dime-store erotica. There are their four children of varying degrees of precociousness and parentage (only the youngest, near-silent toddler Wilder, is the product of both Jack and Babette). And then there is Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), not a member of the family but a close enough academic colleague of Jack’s at the local College-on-the-Hill that we might as well lump him in here.

As Baumbach loosely but energetically traces the structure of DeLillo’s capital-I Intellectual epic, all the characters above find themselves starting or stopping their stories at the A&P. The Gladneys are there just before an “airborne toxic event” suddenly throws their unnamed Ohio town into chaos, giving Baumbach licence to inject a COVID-panic booster of a metaphor into DeLillo’s original strain of all-American paranoia. And the Gladneys are there afterward, their lives altered in ways big and small, yet still compelled to fill their carts and stock their shelves. Because, as Murray puts it, “Here we don’t die, we shop.”

Is the grocery store the skeleton key to unlocking DeLillo’s novel, and thus Baumbach’s film? Almost certainly, so much as White Noise can be boiled down to just one thing or theme or feeling – a good-to-have problem that Baumbach uses to his advantage. With the same electric back-and-forth wit that powered his funniest films ( Frances Ha , Mistress America , The Meyerowitz Stories ) balanced with the reverence of a grad student who knows he cannot quite reach the heights of those he studies, Baumbach pulls off an adaptation that is as dynamic and complicated as the source material.

White Noise. (L to R) Adam Driver as Jack, Greta Gerwig as Babette, and Don Cheadle as Murray in White Noise. Cr. Wilson Webb/Netflix © 2022

Is the grocery store the skeleton key to unlocking DeLillo’s novel, and thus Baumbach’s film? Wilson Webb/Netflix

Taking the approach that any cinematic version of DeLillo’s work needs to go as big as the author’s metaphors – the opposite tack that David Cronenberg took with 2012′s Cosmopolis – Baumbach reaches for near-Spielbergian heights with his film’s first half. As the mysterious toxic threat looms over Jack and his family, it seems that the entire world is reduced to staring up at the sky in awe, as impressed with the danger as they are terrified by it. But there is a distinct, and welcome, lack of sentimentality here, too, with Baumbach able to swerve the tone into a more cerebral version of National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, of all things. Imagine if Clark Griswold studied fascism and carried around a teeny-tiny pistol, and you’ll start to get the idea.

The film’s second half dips into the kind of marriage story that Baumbach is more familiar with, all inevitable jealousies and misplaced passions. Yet despite being more firmly in the director’s wheelhouse, it is here where White Noise starts to sputter and wheeze. Maybe it is because former Frances Ha co-stars Driver (sporting a prosthetic paunch) and Gerwig (frizzy hair and Minnie Mouse sweaters) are better at playing off their onscreen children than each other – the pair’s chemistry is too firmly lab-controlled.

Or maybe it is because Baumbach cannot for the life of him control who or what Lars Eidinger’s character should be, this German drug peddler who saunters into the third act with a broad level of sleaze. But no missteps here are fatal, and given the intimidating reputation of DeLillo’s work (”unfilmable!” they all said, and maybe they’re right), challenges are to be expected, even anticipated.

The biggest miss? Baumbach neglects to include Jack and Murray’s visit to “the most photographed barn in America,” which offers DeLillo an opportunity to delve into the hall-of-mirrors concept of the simulacrum: what happens when we get lost in taking pictures of taking pictures, as Murray puts it.

Perhaps in Baumbach’s version, the A&P stands in for the barn. If any supermarket could be the most photographed supermarket in America, it is the perfectly designed, deceptively comforting one serving the shoppers of 2022′s White Noise .

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What Went Wrong With White Noise

Iconic source material, big budget, top talent. So what gives?

preview for White Noise | Official Trailer | (Netflix)

So you have to give it up for Noah Baumbach . He took a book many people said was unfilmable , and frankly, filmed the shit out of it. Every frame is interesting, every camera movement and bit of blocking considered. White Noise 's background is a rich tapestry, brimming with color, texture, and detail. (See: UFOs on a gas station's TV, shadow puppets on a tent at the refugee camp.) For a director who has heretofore worked exclusively in the realm of low-to-mid-budget interpersonal dramas, Baumbach proves more than proficient at action setpieces. He fjords a station wagon, lets loose a magnificently ominous billowing cloud, makes spectacle out of a traffic jam. The truck-train crash that sets off the airborne toxic event is one of the most visually stunning things I saw in a movie last year.

And it’s not just the translation of words to images. Baumbach’s White Noise is occasionally quite funny, too. Don Cheadle (as professor Murray Jay Suskind), in particular, makes song out of DeLillo’s dialogue, juicing lines like "Hitler is now Gladney’s Hitler" and "All white people have a favorite Elvis song" for all their elevated absurdity. The joint lecture Suskind and Gladney give juxtaposing Elvis and Hitler as fellow momma’s boys is a high point for the film, with the two professors slowly circling each other in an ironic joust of high-minded academese.

Really, there are many individual moments within the film that are admirably executed, if not full-on cinematic achievements. It’s an adaptation that’s remarkably faithful to the book, so it shouldn’t disappoint fans on grounds of fidelity. And yet, in total? The film is not so much challenging as it is frustrating. Baumbach’s film never quite gains narrative momentum or hits home emotionally. There’s the sense of it being less than the sum of its parts, which is ultimately perplexing. What exactly went wrong here? I found myself thinking after walking out of a screening. Here are a couple theories.

Did Noah Baumbach Miscast Jack and Babette?

Casting Adam Driver as Jack and Greta Gerwig as Babette makes a lot of sense. Throw dark glasses and a receding hairline on Driver. Give Gerwig sweats and big hair, and each actor more or less matches the physical descriptions of DeLillo’s characters. The two actors have shown chemistry together in previous movies. At this point, they’re Baumbach’s two closest collaborators—and, of course, they're also two of our greatest working actors.

.css-f6drgc:before{margin:-0.99rem auto 0 -1.33rem;left:50%;width:2.1875rem;border:0.3125rem solid #FF3A30;height:2.1875rem;content:'';display:block;position:absolute;border-radius:100%;} .css-1aglugu{font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-roboto,Lausanne-local,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:1.75rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1aglugu{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1aglugu b,.css-1aglugu strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1aglugu em,.css-1aglugu i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;}.css-1aglugu:before{content:'＂';display:block;padding:0.3125rem 0.875rem 0 0;font-size:3.5rem;line-height:0.8;font-style:italic;font-family:Lausanne,Lausanne-fallback,Lausanne-styleitalic-roboto,Lausanne-styleitalic-local,Arial,sans-serif;} White Noise wants to be fun, but it’s missing a catalyst. In this case, making a film about death do.

But whereas Cheadle is able to bring DeLillo’s unnatural dialogue to life, Driver and Gerwig flatten it. They each inflect their speech with a dry, melancholy affect that’s a little too cute to have much emotional resonance. You could argue that that’s the point: their characters’ morbid obsession—coupled with the overbearing stimulus of American life—has drained them of feeling. But we as viewers shouldn’t be left impassive. There are moments in the film—Jack’s nightmare, and when he steps onto the roof to look at the plume of smoke—that are meant to communicate the characters’ anxiety. But in Driver and Gerwig’s hands, that anxiety is never palpable. The actors don’t infect us with their dread. And without feeling that fear of death, Jack and Babette's concerns lack resonance.

Does Music Kill White Noise 's Momentum?

The emotional disconnect goes beyond White Noise ’s two leads. The magic trick DeLillo pulled off was making the book at once authentically dark and raucously comic. In Baumbach’s film, both qualities—especially the former—are muted. That relative dullness may in part be due to the film’s subtle use of music.

Baumbach tapped Danny Elfman for a minimal score that sonically foregrounds the white noise of contemporary (or now, semi-contemporary) life: the domestic bickering, the hum of appliances, the constant chatter of the television. The score functions as a nod to the music you’d hear in the blockbuster fare that dominated the '80s. As Elfman told Variety , "Early on, [Baumbach] said, 'I want to have an '80s electronic influence, an electronic influence, but not overtly specific. Imagine if we were combining something somewhere between Giorgio Moroder and Tangerine Dream with Aaron Copland.'" The score they wound up with is passable as pastiche, but the music does little to amplify the film’s fun moments and heighten its chilling ones.

The music—or lack thereof—also, I suspect, stunts the film’s momentum. For a film that constantly sets its characters in motion—bounding around the house, perusing the supermarket, fleeing town, pursuing violence— White Noise stops and starts more than a Chevy stuck in a river. The tension and adrenaline teased in the film’s LCD Soundsystem-sountracked trailer never quite translates to the film itself. (Or, at least, it doesn’t until LCD’s “new body rhumba” kicks in during the credit sequence.) The second half of the movie, in particular, drags. It's not for lack of action. An affair is revealed! A gun is shot! White Noise wants to be fun, but it’s missing a catalyst. In this case, making a film about death doesn’t justify it lacking life.

Please, streamers and studios, keep investing in this kind of ambitious, non-franchise movie—whether from Baumbach or one of his many talented peers. White Noise may not totally stick the landing, but even the ways in which it fails are more interesting than big-budget fare as of late. I, for one, would love to see Baumbach get a chance to crash some more cars.

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COMMENTS

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Advertisement. "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.
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As "White Noise" tends to lag, it becomes haunted by the James Baldwin quote it presents at the beginning: "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.". Though that stance is right on the money when it comes to hatred, Lombroso ...
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Film critic Peter Travers shares his review of director Noah Baumbach's new film "White Noise," starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and more. 'GMA' Deals & Steals $20 & under! ... To understand "White Noise," the new Noah Baumbach movie now streaming on Netflix, extend the definition of the term to the clamor of the modern media ...
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Los Angeles Times. Dec 1, 2022. 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.
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Netflix's White Noise is the electric, ambitious, messy adaptation Don DeLillo's epic novel deserves Barry Hertz Published November 30, 2022 Updated December 1, 2022
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White Noise wants to be fun, but it's missing a catalyst. In this case, making a film about death do. But whereas Cheadle is able to bring DeLillo's unnatural dialogue to life, Driver and ...
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Netflix’s White Noise is the electric, ambitious, messy adaptation Don DeLillo’s epic novel deserves

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What Went Wrong With White Noise

Did Noah Baumbach Miscast Jack and Babette?

Does Music Kill White Noise 's Momentum?

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