Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s seminal, “unfilmable” postmodern novel White Noise opens, rather aptly, with a series of car crashes. Murray Jay Siskind (Don Cheadle), a respected professor at the anonymously named College-on-the-Hill, is screening the assembled stock footage to a group of students enrolled in his seminar, explaining to them that there’s a certain American “can-do” attitude to the vehicular carnage that they’re blankly witnessing. “Each car crash is meant to be better than the last,” he remarks, noting that they’re not violent acts, but mini-celebrations each time one’s properly executed.
In DeLillo’s world, this comment suggests not only one-upmanship in terms of technical ability, but a never-ending crescendoing effect that impending disaster naturally produces. But in a broader sense, this sentiment could also accurately describe the trajectory of Baumbach’s career: a series of bigger and bigger filmic pileups, each increasingly seeking to affirm their maker’s creative powers and, to a certain extent, intended to outdo the last.
After the critical hosannas for 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories and 2019’s Marriage Story—Baumbach’s two biggest departures from his largely lighthearted, mumblecore-ish roots and into prestige-style filmmaking—how exactly does this respected auteur one-up himself? Attempting to do the impossible, it seems. Indeed, White Noise, on paper, appears to be a natural move for the writer-director given the increasing scope of his ambition—he’s secured both his highest budget to date, a whopping $80 million, and possibly his boldest material as a director in one fell swoop—where now, no longer content to strictly comment on the lives of insular elites, Baumbach feels equipped to make grand statements on society as a whole.
White Noise is a book filled with big ideas—about rampant consumerism, impending death, the dumbing-down of all public information, and so on—but Baumbach’s adaptation rarely articulates any of them with any real sense of the outside world without resorting to the easy exaggerations that DeLillo peddled in the name of satire, which, while maybe fresh back in 1985, ring completely hollow today. Even if Baumbach is self-aware enough to recognize the dated nature of his material, it only ever manifests in aloof and obvious ways.
Murray’s colleague and the film’s actual protagonist, Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), is a pioneer in the field of Hitler studies, yet he can’t speak a lick of German, secretly taking lessons in order to learn the basics before an upcoming conference. This is the first of many cheap shots aimed at academic-based performativity run afoul, treating all higher-education instructors like they’re clandestine con artists who blindly babble on about only the most esoteric of topics. Long before Jack’s first absurd lesson on Hitler even commences, you may start wondering when the last time anyone associated with this motion picture stepped inside of a university classroom.
Not only does Murray teach classes on frivolous entertainment, he wishes to establish an Elvis Presley studies program that’s a mirror image of Jack’s inane curriculum regarding the former leader of the Third Reich. (Baumbach’s conservative disdain for professors who dare attempt to engage with their students and not simply trumpet the classics is unmistakable.) Murray and Jack eventually engage in a theatrical public lecture about Elvis and Hitler, linking them because they had doting mothers and liked dogs. But the connective tissue between these two historical personalities is so obviously tangential that the scene seems to exist only to take aim at insular academics and their propensity to shoehorn their field of study into any conversion.
No less exaggerated is Baumbach’s depiction of Jack’s home life, what with the incessant digs at the traditional family unit delivered in the same self-satisfied tone as the academic-bashing. Jack lives with his fourth wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their four children—three of which are from different marriages, of course—and all communicate with one another in the same disconnected, argumentative manner as the characters in DeLillo’s book. Here, though, we very much get to hear how their conversations frequently overlap, and often in stilted fashion. It’s already a demanding proposition to have us endure one overstuffed, numbing exchange between characters, and things become outright oppressive whenever several occur at once.
For a while, White Noise seemingly has more in common with the medium of television than it does with cinema; laborious, long-take tracking shots comprise a majority of the film’s lengthy sequences, with a heavy reliance on shot-reverse shots to do most of the heavy lifting whenever things turn into a one-on-one verbal free-for-all. But after a lethal chemical spill from a ravaged rail car releases a noxious chemical-filled fog into the sky—nicknamed “The Airborne Toxic Event”—Jack, along with Baumbach, is forced to flee his comfort zone and take refuge elsewhere. For Jack, that involves evacuating his home and trying to save his family, and for Baumbach, that involves leaving the confines of a basic three-camera setup.
It’s here where the film should, if not take off, at least begin to show some signs of stimulation. But Baumbach doesn’t have a firm grasp on how to instill much excitement into this narrative, even when it becomes about the effects of a deadly epidemic. It’s also here where the film begins to slowly diverge from DeLillo’s text by sprinkling in a few extended action-oriented sequences that, while providing a much-needed change of pace, do little to demonstrate that Baumbach has anything resembling, say, Steven Spielberg’s facility with dynamism. The biggest set pieces here involve Jack’s parked car at a gas station—in a scene completely dependent on unremarkable CGI to effectively draw any chills—and, later, him pursuing a truck through a forest. When Baumbach tries to mine some Spielbergian wonder from the latter, all he can drum up is a precocious kid going “Let’s do that again!” after his parents drive off of an inclined ramp.
Things return to a predictable groove once the pandemic is supposedly over; while never specially referenced as such, Baumbach is more than happy to draw comparisons to one with a few oh-so-timely references to indoor mask-wearing and distrust in governmental agencies. White Noise then shifts its attention to Babette’s ongoing addiction to Dylar, a new psychoactive street drug that eliminates any user’s fear of death. She and Jack monologue at length about their ultimate demise—they reassure one another that they’d surely be the more distraught party if the other went first—but their anxieties never have any tangible emotional weight to them. At least, they have none once placed in a vacuum as airtight and cold as the world White Noise conjures up, one so hermetic that it becomes impossibly suffocating.
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