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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: 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: 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

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White Noise may occasionally struggle with its allegedly unfilmable source material, but Noah Baumbach succeeds in finding the humorous heart of its surprisingly timely story.

White Noise wants you to think it has smart and interesting things to say, but it's mostly just a pretentious slog.

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White Noise review: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s apocalyptic death dreams prove oddly comforting

There are touches of steven spielberg and david lynch to noah baumbach’s adaptation of the ‘unfilmable’ don delillo classic, article bookmarked.

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Despite all their self-mythologisation, filmmakers are still ultimately mortal. So it’d be entirely forgivable if they’d spent the past few years preoccupied with death. Why else would Noah Baumbach have been so drawn to make White Noise ? This is, after all, an adaptation of Don DeLillo ’s supposedly “unfilmable” novel that positions fear of the grave as the driving force behind every American ideal, from station wagons to Elvis Presley.

DeLillo’s language is severe and enchantingly precise; every individual in his world is a philosopher lecturing to no one but themselves. His book is set in the Eighties and concerns a miniaturised apocalypse triggered by a cloud of chemicals – not an obvious fit, then, for Baumbach, whose films ( Marriage Story ; The Meyerowitz Stories ) largely concern the most intricate neuroses of modern-day, self-branded intellectuals. But there is nothing more self-centred, perhaps, than a fear of death. And even the director’s most likeable characters, such as Greta Gerwig ’s freewheeling protagonist of Frances Ha , suffer from acute narcissism. The effect here is that his White Noise comes across far more sentimentally than DeLillo likely ever intended. Yet its forgiving nature is oddly comforting.

Its story concerns Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver , plus paunch and receding hairline), a world leader in the academic study of Adolf Hitler, and his fearful but radiant wife Babette (Gerwig). Something about Driver’s role here reminds me of his character from HBO’s Girls , in the way the actor can imbue even the most pathetic of his roles with twisted, heroic grandeur. Jack is a somewhat passive father figure, who explodes into life in the lecture hall. Gerwig, Baumbach’s real-life partner and frequent collaborator, can deliver sincerity without fakery, as both a performer and, in her own work, as a director. That becomes crucial for Babette, who possesses the film’s most vulnerable, straightforwardly emotional monologue.

Jack and Babette have four children. There is the eldest, Denise (Raffey Cassidy). The middle children are Heinrich and Steffie, played by Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer’s two children, Sam and May. Their youngest, a toddler, is named Wilder (Dean and Henry Moore). All are excellently cast. Their home is a kaleidoscope of voices and overlapping non-sequiturs. At one point, when it seems like the family might be in real danger, one of the kids pips up with: “Do sheep have eyelashes?” Such is the curse of living in DeLillo’s world, where there are too many thoughts to be thought and little room to engage in reality. That becomes a real problem when the town is threatened by an “airborne toxic event” triggered by a truck’s collision with a freight train.

Baumbach has omitted one of the most famous passages of DeLillo’s book, in which his characters visit the “Most Photographed Barn in America”. The author uses it to theorise that our reality is now so documented and commodified that it ceases to exist as an independent state. We’re never looking at the barn as it is, but only at the barn as it’s been photographed. Rather than try and clumsily translate the passage onto film, Baumbach instead finds his own way to integrate that idea into the very language of his adaptation. White Noise , therefore, swings wildly between cinematic allusions – there are car chases, hints of Spielbergian wonderment, touches of David Lynch’s dream logic, and Brian De Palma’s lurid thrillers. It ends with a musical dance sequence set to LCD Soundsystem.

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Much like the “Most Photographed Barn in America”, these references create distance. They help us face the mortal terrors of White Noise with a little more ease. The same could be said of the Gladney’s familiar rituals, from their supermarket trips to their daily verbal pile-ups. But Baumbach also suggests these might be nothing but harmful delusions, ultimately making us blind to fate. The spectacle of society may be our only comfort, but could it also herald our ultimate doom?

Dir: Noah Baumbach. Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith, Don Cheadle, Sam Nivola, May Nivola. 15, 136 minutes

‘White Noise’ is streaming on Netflix from 30 December

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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.

‘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’ review: don’t miss this darkly funny family drama starring Adam Driver

In Noah Baumbach's brilliant new satire, you'll laugh and wince in one breath

A film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s great post-modern novel has been in the works for years. Men In Black ’s Barry Sonnenfeld, The Simpsons ’ James L. Brooks, and Hamlet director Michael Almereyda have all attached their names to canned attempts at adapting his satirical 1985 novel White Noise before Noah Baumbach finally succeeded. In a way, it’s easy to see why – it’s an astoundingly difficult piece of fiction to translate to the screen. The novel’s events span an entire surreal year in the life of professor Jack Gladney and his family, exploring rampant consumerism, the increasing dominance of technology, huge-scale disasters, unknown airborne chemicals causing unspecified diseases, ecological disaster, and rogue drugs to take the fearful sting out of death itself, peddled by a person (and also composite) called Mr Grey. Though plane-crashes and mysterious deaths punctuate the story, watched with grim fascination, the biggest disaster of all is the ominously titled Airborne Toxic Event. The huge black plume is potentially fatal, causing early symptoms such as sweaty palms, nausea, and a sense of déjà vu . It also forces Jack and his wife Babette to directly confront their shared fears of death – and sheds incisive light on the spectacle and artifice of modern life.

Sporting a frankly terrible leather jacket, and an inflated sense of self-importance, Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney flawlessly. Gladney is a minor academic celebrity thanks to pioneering the disconcerting field of ‘Hitler Studies’ – a new technique that involves detaching the Nazi leader completely from the unspeakable atrocities he committed, and examining him as a kind of ahistorical icon instead. His wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) has curly and “important” hair, and secretly pops mysterious pills called Dylar – between them, the two divorcees share a clan of four kids who have knitted together into a fairly functional family. Above all else, they’re obsessed with and deeply fearful of mortality, frequently worrying about who will die first. “Who decides these things?” agonises Jack as he lies in bed. “What is out there? Who are you?”

When it was first published in 1985, White Noise ’s key elements still felt like distant horrors, looming on the horizon like the toxic, belching cloud that floats over the generic midwestern town of Blacksmith. Today, meanwhile, we regularly witness untold atrocities happening in real-time, beamed into the palms of our hands. Each one of us can now identify easily with the panicked scramble of the rapidly-unfolding unknown; the misinformation, the panic, ever-changing symptoms, and the conspiracists who believe the government has something to hide. We have all lived it over the past few years. Does that take some of the bite out of Baumbach’s skilled adaptation of a notoriously complicated literary classic, or make it all the more timely?

Broadly faithful to the source material, Baumbach makes surprisingly light work of translating its onslaught of images to the screen. Here, too, dialogue is droll and slightly uneasy; characters seem detached from reality in a way that’s hard to put your finger on.

That said, White Noise does have weak spots. Dylar-flogging pharmacist Mr Grey is foreshadowed by an incredibly jarring horror treatment, while the sharply dry dialogue doesn’t always leave space for nuance. By and large, though, Baumbach handles the challenge brilliantly – stand-out passages that don’t make the final cut are cleverly alluded to, and by the time it wraps up, you barely miss the original ending. Instead, Baumbach dishes up an epic and surreal final dance scene soundtracked by LCD Soundsystem ’s ‘new body rhumba’ – and it’s the absurdist sign-off it deserves.

• Director: Noah Baumbach
• Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle
• Release date: December 2 (in cinemas), December 30 ( Netflix )
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• Venice Review: Noah Baumbach’s <i>White Noise</i> Is a Lot of Talking With Not So Much to Say

Venice Review: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise Is a Lot of Talking With Not So Much to Say

D on DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise is the kind of book that earns review quotes like “Mordantly funny and ultimately moving,” the book critic’s way of chortling knowingly while also making sure we know he’s taking this thing seriously. Noah Baumbach’s movie version of White Noise —the opening-night film of the 79th Venice Film Festival—is knowing and self-serious in the same way, a movie about the American condition, whatever that is, that feels beamed in from the planet of the chuckling beard strokers. It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of it.

The movie, like the book, is set in a middle-American college town in the 1980s, with a main character, Jack Gladney (played by Adam Driver), whose specialty is Hitler studies—he proudly invented this line of study in 1968 and has been rolling with it ever since. He lives in one of those comfortable academic’s houses, sporting floral wallpaper and lots of natural woodwork, with his wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), and their children from previous marriages, plus one son they created together. Their life is mundane and uneventful, if talky. Then a toxic cloud drifts into their environs, prompting mass evacuation and, worse, existential thoughts. This is a story about the fear of death, the nature of love and our purpose as sentient organisms in a consumer society. Or something like that.

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Baumbach adapted the novel himself, and he hews closely in tone to DeLillo’s book, alerting us clearly when it’s supposed to be drily funny and when we might be moved to shed a thoughtful tear. Driver’s Jack loves his life, though he seems afraid to admit it, preferring to spin out intersecting lines of questions and observations. When a student in one of his classes—he’s a professor at a school with the winkingly generic name College on the Hill—asks about Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed plot to kill Hitler, he responds with a soliloquy as twitchily superior as a pince-nez: “All plots move deathward. This is the nature of plots.” Later, as a guest in the classroom of his colleague, Murray (Don Cheadle), he and his friend launch into a call-and-response lecture linking Elvis Presley and Hitler in a web of similarities that’s confident but dumb. Both loved dogs! Both had mothers who smothered them! These are the kinds of thoughts generated by people with too much time on their hands, or by academics brought to life by writers with too much faith in their own cleverness.

Jack also loves his wife, though he doesn’t fully understand her. Gerwig’s Babette is good-natured, a little flaky, a robust figure of womanhood in her jogging outfits. She and Jack have the kind of jaunty-but-serious conversations people have in books, wondering aloud, for example, which of them will die first. “Life is good, Jack,” she tells her husband as the two lie entwined in bed. “I just feel it has to be said.” Much of the movie’s dialogue comes straight from DeLillo, to the point where the actors seem to be reciting memorized language rather than acting. Meanwhile, the children who are old enough to speak do a lot of it. (They’re played by Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, and May Nivola.) They chatter away, asking so many questions that most go unanswered; they also proffer information and misinformation about things like what, exactly, camels store in their humps. They represent the precious chaos of family life, the very thing that’s threatened not just by the kind of “airborne toxic event” that sweeps into Jack and Babette’s comfortable little town, but by the secret that Babette has been keeping from her husband, one whose revelation sends the movie tumbling into intentional absurdity in the movie’s final act.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

The hope, maybe, is that the audience will respond properly to the film’s mannered yuks and take cautious pleasure in its “life is good, sort of” resolution. Baumbach is clear about the fact that this is an adaptation of a book that’s now almost 40 years old: he stylizes everything, from the squirrelly spirals of Babette’s hairdo to the brisk yet soothing color tones of the college cafeteria. It all seems a little unreal, by design—everything feels signaled rather than felt, which is true of DeLillo’s book, too. The effect is distancing to the point of smugness. Baumbach even ends the movie with a supermarket ballet, a riot of color and movement set amid aisles chock-full of all sorts of things money can buy. This is the American way, the movie seems to be saying, and that’s OK. Or if it’s not OK, it’s just the way things are, so may as well go with it. It’s hard to know exactly what Baumbach is going for here, other than perhaps reminding us that the key to living is just going about your life. But you probably don’t need two hours and 16 minutes’ worth of movie to tell you that.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Alt-Right Showcase Is the Scariest Documentary of the Year

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Half a decade ago, the ascendance of the alt-right was about as plausible as the election of Donald Trump, and we all know how that worked out. Like the 2016 election, director Daniel Lombroso’s provocative alt-right portrait “ White Noise ” isn’t all that surprising, but that doesn’t lessen the terror within. In capturing the racist trifecta of alt-right pundits Mike Cernovich, Laura Southern, and Richard Spencer, the documentary shows how they became emboldened by celebrity stature, and comes so close to letting them run the show it risks trumpeting their cause. Fortunately, it doesn’t take the most discerning bullshit detector to realize that “White Noise” has been engineered to expose a fundamental danger to whatever moral fabric America has left. Lombroso has made the scariest documentary of the year without telling us anything new.

However, for the lucky few who somehow avoided any of this movie’s subjects and their small armies of white nationalist devotees, “White Noise” provides a handy primer (and just enough to avoid the need to dig further). Working closely with his subjects over the course of several years, Lombroso seems to have gained their trust, and his camera manages to track them across boisterous media appearances as they flaunt their provocative stupidity to every possible camera, including many adoring crowds.

Yet it also finds them at an inflection point — empowered by Trump’s election, but uncertain how to clarify the next steps. Spencer, the neo-Nazi who went viral for his infamous “Heil Trump” speech in 2016, annoys the hell out of Cernovich, the nebbishy “anti-feminist” blogger who prefers to deem his loathsome views as a defense against “white genocide.” Splitting the difference between the two, 25-year-old Canadian YouTube star Lauren Southern spouts maniacal xenophobic arguments against immigration and women’s rights with a camera-ready smirk that hangs over her most radical pronouncements like an awkward Trojan horse. Zipping between these as it maps out their deranged community, the movie implies varying degrees of danger on display: Spencer’s Hitleresque ambition makes for quite the horror show, but Cernovich’s unassuming dopiness and Southern’s next-gen Ann Coulter charm are just as alarming for the way they attempt to soften their putrid views with personality. At its worst, “White Noise” goes there with them.

Like Errol Morris’ unnerving “American Dharma,” the filmmaker’s feature-length one-on-one with alt-right folk hero Steve Bannon, “White Noise” enters a moral gray zone by virtue of its very existence. Yes, there’s no ambiguity about the source of outrage when a Colombia University audience revolts against Cernovich, or journalists assail Spencer for his role in inciting the Charlottesville riots that resulted in one woman’s death. Yet as the movie follows the traditional cinema verite beats by watching its characters go to work, it often doesn’t go far enough in clarifying its moral compass. Viewers can sort most of it out for themselves, but the movie’s give-em-enough-rope philosophy means that even as “White Noise” exposes the culture of internet-based disinformation that created these monsters, it actually becomes a part of the same problematic spotlight that thrust them onto the national stage.

Still, there’s a fascinating gamble involved in the way the movie dares viewers to stomach its most upsetting moments, most of which come from Southern, who seems to navigate the backlash with aplomb at every turn. That includes her delight over the positive reaction to her disingenuous immigration documentary “Borderless” to the moronic declarations she manages to toss out to appreciative crowds. (“Go to Africa and you will see rape culture” being one of many.) Spencer, whose style sense is best described as “fascist boy band,” looks increasingly pathetic as his crowds dwindle post-Charlottesville, while Cernovich is reduced to selling skin-care products after the media gets over his rebel image. Southern, by contrast, almost comes across as a source of sympathy. One shocking moment finds Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes propositioning her after an interview, and the sense of individuality she expresses in that moment creates one of the more troubling conflicts the movie offers up. Southern doesn’t deserve to be anyone’s hero, but “White Noise” dares to make her human.

Documentarians have been holding their noses in these putrid depths of bigotry for decades. Michael Moore and Kevin Rafferty’s “Blood in the Face” made clear the ambitions of neo-Nazis on American soil almost 30 years ago, while Morris’ Bannon doc came out shortly before another more explicit condemnation of the man in Alison Klayman’s “The Brink.” Yet “White Noise” comes across as the most harrowing of the bunch, less for the evil it exposes than the extent it allows them to control the narrative.

If there’s any source of comfort that comes from spending time with these loonies — aside from, hey, you really ought to vote in this election — it comes from the implication that they might just cancel each other out. As Cernovich derides Spencer’s Nazism for “holding us back,” while Spencer recalls Cernovich’s previous career as “a really gross sex-blogger,” it’s enough to make the case that they could simply scream each other into oblivion. (Spencer, who’s living with his mother and facing pending criminal charges, may face more precise justice than that.) The jury’s still out on Southern, now a young mother and wife (to a non-white person, though she won’t get into that for the camera), but let’s hope this particular open-ended character doesn’t merit a sequel.

In fact, let’s hope society doesn’t. “White Noise” culminates by letting its subjects share their delusions of grandeur, but can’t sort out if they’re pathetic or practical in these uncertain times. The documentary stops short of investigating how the world got this way, or what it will take to set things right. It might have helped, in a movie so committed to stating its main problem, to offer some semblance of solution. (Hello, education!) Nevertheless, “White Noise” has a compelling message at its core, by daring viewers to see the worst of our society, and cautioning against the tendency to simply tuning it out.

“White Noise” is now available for VOD rental.

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White Noise

Details: 2005, USA, Cert 15, 101 mins

Direction: Geoffrey Sax

Genre: Drama / Romance / Thriller

Summary: A man is contacted from beyond the grave by his murdered wife

With: Chandra West ,  Deborah Kara Unger ,  Ian McNeice ,  Ian McNiece ,  Michael Keaton ,  Nicholas Elia and Sarah Strange

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