When it was announced that Noah Baumbach’s latest will open the 79th Venice Film Festival, I debated whether to read Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel on which it is based. It could be argued both ways what would be “fair” for the movie. In the end I decided against it and chose to head into the screening completely blind, to view the screen adaptation purely on its own terms. And it’s… a journey. WHITE NOISE is a bit of absurdist comedy, marital drama, disaster epic, social satire. It’s a highly intellectualized, metaphorical take on the existential angst with a narrative beat that might prove tricky to lock into. As a reflective, idiosyncratic piece of art, however, it offers plenty to chew on.
In the intriguingly macabre opening scene, Don Cheadle’s character introduces the idea of movie car crashes being a symbol of American optimism. He points to this uniquely American cinematic tradition as a montage of ever-more elaborate stunt collisions and explosions plays to an audience of college students. If one can look past the promise of casualty, he argues, these gruesome set pieces are actually all about new beginnings, rebirths.
With that in mind, we dive into the film and meet Jack (Adam Driver), a fellow professor in “Hitler Studies”, his wife Babbette (Greta Gerwig) and their four kids from different marriages. From the get-go you notice something peculiar about this family. It’s not just dad’s gangster shades and mom’s crazy curls. It’s the way they constantly talk over one another, each seemingly lost in their own anxieties and secret obsessions. The teenage son’s fascination with invisible toxins goes into overdrive when a freight train accident released chemicals into a cloud drifting over their town. Along with everyone else in the area, the family packs up and leaves for a community shelter to hide from the killer cloud. And that’s all before Babbett’s pill addiction leads Jack to a ghostly German man (Lars Eidinger) who may or may not be death Himself.
So yeah, it’s safe to say WHITE NOISE is like nothing Baumbach has done before. Forget about the wealth of emotions one seeks in his carefully constructed scenarios and dialogue, there’s next to no fuzzy feelings in this one. Instead, Baumbach is going for the messiness of the human mind, our animal fear of death and the pathetic means we come up with to cope. The bookish-sounding dialogue (I would not be surprised if many were lifted verbatim from the novel) immediately gives the scenes a stilted sense of surrealism. And although it did take me a while to get used to the way the characters talk, ultimately I think this contributes to the overall strange, chilly unpredictability of the film. At some point you realize you’re probably not supposed to identify with any of the people you see on screen, but observe them like specimen of our species debilitated by the idea of mortality.
As such, this film isn’t the kind of performance showcase you’d expect from the maker of MARRIAGE STORY or THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Driver and Gerwig are reliably game, committing to the eccentricities of their characters with relish and conviction. Eidinger impresses with a wholly creepy supporting performance that gives a pivotal scene in the final act the grit and kink it needs. DP Lol Crawley and composer Danny Elfman both did a fine job accentuating the outlandishness of the film. The former shoots the scenes of mass evacuation under the alien cloud with a sense of doomsday spectacle. The latter brings his signature freaky notes to spice up both the comedy and the dread.
What surprised me the most about WHITE NOISE is Baumbach’s direction. I admire his vision for a visually and tonally wild but at its core very cerebral film. I appreciate his getting way out of his comfort zone and trying something with a real nasty kick to it. There’s an almost-Cronenbergian flair to the motel scene with Eidinger that feels rawly cinematic in a way we’ve never experienced from his filmography. It’s likely that people will have vastly different interpretations of and reactions to this film. For me, it succeeds in capturing an abstract if constant, subaudible buzz of panic coursing through modern society, and the absurdity of our attempts at pretending we don’t hear all that noise.
So that’s one competition film down and 22 more to go. Stay tuned for more from the Lido!
