White Noise
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Running time: 2hr10 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Adam Driver stars in White Noise
“Sprawling” is an adjective that can have positive or negative connotations. Suburban sprawl doesn’t suggest beauty or excitement. But a person sprawled luxuriously on a sofa might be highly appealing. The new film from Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) sprawls in positive and negative ways.
White Noise is an adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel, his eighth. It’s noted for bashing a whole mess of different styles together in one book, a technique which has obvious appeal for a filmmaker — an adaptation can choose to employ the cinematic grammar of mannered, stylised theatricality one moment and deploy event cinema tableaux full of sound and fury the next moment.
Hopefully, the actors at the heart of it all can provide enough of a throughline that we are able to sustain focus as we zip through a PhD’s worth of thematic discourse about all the big questions: death, fear, consumerism, Elvis. Make no mistake, that’s a tough assignment for a performer, and I can imagine at least half a dozen actors really floundering. Baumbach has cast Adam Driver as the protagonist, Jack Gladney, and he throws himself with gusto into the part. As our focal point, the one constant in a world that satirizes fashions in academia one minute before wittily borrowing stock shots from blockbusters a few seconds later, he must work hard to keep the show on the road as it weaves in and out of plausible human behaviours, sometimes minutely observing contemporary idiocies, sometimes indulging in wild surrealism. It’s a banquet of many courses and there must have been moments during production when the filmmakers wondered if they were biting off more than they could chew — this is ambitious filmmaking.
And, well… not all of it landed, for me — there is something oddly laminated about some of the comic dialogue, as lines which would be very funny on the page don’t quite take flight in practice. But don’t worry! Because five seconds later you’re in a family station wagon, drifting down a river, the whole situation effortlessly visually arresting. As a compelling postmodern bricolage of ideas, delivered on a grand scale, it may not always hit, but most of us should be so lucky to create misses this intriguing.
WHITE NOISE (2022) Written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo | Shot by Lol Crawley | Edited by Matthew Hannam
Screened in Competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival
