‘White Noise’: Venice Review

Dir/scr. Noah Baumbach. UK/US. 2022. 136 mins.

Don DeLillo’s zeitgeist-y postmodern novel White Noise was one of the cultural highs of the mid-1980s. Narrated by a US professor of Hitler Studies, it took aim at consumerism, pop-culture academia, unreliable information, paranoia, pill-dependency and man’s talent for environmental catastrophe. None of those things have gone away and some have mutated into even scarier monsters: so surely Noah Baumbach’s long-awaited film adaptation, which opened the 2022 Venice Film Festival before landing later this year on Netflix, has plenty to say about today?

Baumbach’s substantial faithfulness to a novel that becomes a sort of fever dream almost defeats him — and us

Yes and no. Baumbach films White Noise as a 1984 period piece that is also a strange kind of marital love story — one about a distracted man (Adam Driver) who suddenly realises he’s losing the woman he loves (Greta Gerwig).  That’s not something every reader would take from the book, but it allows the writer-director to make a surprisingly good case for the cinematic translation of a work that was long thought to be un-adaptable. Visually inventive, wryly satirical, White Noise the film leaves viewers to apply DeLillo’s sometimes prescient visions of a morally and physically diseased America to post-pandemic 2022 as they see fit. But is still has a lot going for it, much of it entertaining — not least the way Driver and Gerwig nuzzle into each other’s deadpan performances with infective gusto. In the film’s final third, however, Baumbach’s substantial faithfulness to a novel that becomes a sort of fever dream almost defeats him — and us.

The writer-director’s follow-up to the more focused (but also more solemn) Marriage Story pans out across three loosely-connected chapters. The first follows Jack Gladney’s (Driver) academic life as head of Hitler Studies and Advanced Nazism at the ‘College on the Hill’ (the location was the suitably bucolic University of Akron, Ohio) against the chaotic but cosy home life that he shares with his loving wife Babette (Gerwig) and four children. In the film’s second ‘chapter’, ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, the suspicions of eldest daughter Denise (an excellent Raffey Cassidy) about her mother Babette’s drug dependency are put on hold for a while as the Gladneys and the entire town of Blacksmith are evacuated due to a huge cloud of noxious gas with unknown effects.

Equally unknown are the side effects of Dylar — the experimental, black-market pill that the increasingly forgetful Babette has become addicted to. Dylar, which reputedly cures the fear of death, dominates the film’s increasingly incoherent final section, which ends in a hospital run by an order of German atheist nuns led by Barbara Sukowa.

Set in a brightly-coloured mid-somewhere America designed for happy shiny consumers (of food, pills and education) but inhabited by confused, frightened people, White Noise paints a beautifully arch and sometimes genuinely funny picture of a world out of joint. Driver’s performance — just serious enough to be properly comic — sets the tone. If one awards-season prospect leaps out at this early stage, it would be for Jess Gonchor’s tasty popsicle-hued production design, followed closely by Danny Elfman’s nuanced score, which channels the modern classicism of John Adams, but adds a note of irony to the gravitas.

The film ends on a high note with a stand-alone supermarket dance scene, engagingly choreographed by David Neumann, that runs alongside the closing credits. No matter that the musical backing is provided by LCD Soundsystem: the dance moves – now jerky, now caressingly slow — are pure David Byrne. That’s the mood of White Noise, right there: late-period Talking Heads, that beguiling mix of irony, paranoia and strangely sincere American hopefullness celebrated by a musician who provided the soundtrack of many people’s Don DeLillo-reading years. 

That final dance may be a delight, but it’s also something of a cheat, a feel-good closure for a film that never quite achieves real closure. Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice — another ‘impossible’ literary adaptation — White Noise is best approached as a smorgasbord of tasty fragments, some of them little more than jokes. The film’s puncturing of ‘trivia academia’ — which brings on board a not-entirely-well-used Don Cheadle as a tenured professor who is trying to set up a chair of Elvis studies to rival his friend and colleague Jack’s successful Hitler franchise — feels frankly dated. Mostly, it’s a way to dutifully throw in some DeLillo catchphrases (like the information-overload symptom ‘brain fade’) that fans of the book expect to see.

More trenchant is an ongoing discourse about the way life in certain ‘advanced’ societies can become a kind of performance. It’s there in the slightly stylised register of the dialogue, which takes some getting used to at first. It’s there in Jack’s teaching style — as much audiovisual spectacle as lecture. It’s there in Jack and Babette’s bedtime conversations about death. And it’s also there in the film’s funniest moment — straight out of DeLillo — when Jack realises that an agency called SIMUVAC is using a real evacuation to help them perfect their test-drill evacuation procedure.