White Noise review: Adam Driver’s Netflix film epic arrives just in time

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When books are written about Netflix’s heavy investment in prestige cinema, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise might go down as the goose-killing movie that finally set golden budgets. That’s not to say the streaming service would never fund the auteur’s vanity project — it still hasn’t snagged a Best Picture Oscar, and spoilers, this movie wouldn’t be a winner — but it’s unlikely to do so on this scale again. More expensive was The Irishman, Blonde was a disaster, but for sheer hubris, you can’t beat an apocalyptic adaptation of a supposedly unfilmable literary classic, by a director better known for caustic domestic comedy, on a budget rumored to be $140. million. We certainly won’t see anything like it again – not from Netflix, no way.

You might as well go out with a bang. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s beloved 1985 novel, White Noise is a perplexing, uneven, and intermittently captivating film about the mass psychosis of 1980s America and its run for the apocalypse. It’s essentially three movies in one: a zany satire of academia, consumerism, and modern family followed by a megalomaniacal disaster saga. The final third veers into a surreal, turbulent noir reminiscent of the Coen brothers at their darkest. If you had to guess which one of these Baumbach handles successfully, based on his previous work, you’d almost certainly get it wrong.

Baumbach’s love of the source narrative is evident. This is a faithful, if delightful and unfunny adaptation. It’s only missing a handful of the novel’s beats, while the screenplay, which Baumbach wrote himself, reverently elevates large portions of DeLillo’s dialogue and prose. But, despite his fan credentials, the director is an odd fit for the book. Baumbach specializes in interpersonal dramas, such as Frances Ha or Wedding Story, which are written, acted and shot in a naturalistic style. Still, DeLillo’s book is an arc, stylized, and metaphorical, filled with big ideas, big events, and emotive characters who talk over and over through each other.

Photo: Wilson Webb/Netflix

The story centers around Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor at the delightfully unknown Hitler University who pioneered the provocative field of “Hitler Studies.” At work, Jack covers up his lack of an actual scholarship (he can’t speak German) and engages in a spiraling intellectual rhetoric with his friend Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), who is considering diversification from car accidents to Elvis Presley. At home, Jack humorously runs a rowdy and contentious blended household with his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig). The beleaguered couple vie over which of them is more worried about dying, but something really seems wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is gathering on the horizon — literally. An accident releases a toxic cloud known as an airborne toxic event, and a wave of panic falls upon the Gladnes.

Everything about the material, except for the middle-class intellectual milieu, pushes Baumbach out of his comfort zone. (It’s also the first historical piece he’s ever attempted, and the tight interpretation of ’80s day-glo in costume design and production is one of White Noise’s main pleasures.) He rose to the challenge in unexpected ways. This is his most intense and visually inventive film with a long chalk, and he deftly choreographs a series of stunning scenes: an opening lecture by Don Cheadle’s character, Murray, interspersed with archive footage of a car crash; an academic duel between Jack and Murray, a wanderer and ramble around a lecture stage as they weave together the Hitler and Elvis myths; Jack’s truly spooky night terrors; and a theatrical confrontation between Jack and Babette, late in the film, where he finally gets her to open up and admit the mistake. The latter is wonderfully blocked and beautifully performed, by Gerwig in particular.

Though the flashy CGI train crash that precipitates the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t really work—it symbolizes an ominous disaster, in the book, for being so far and ambiguous—what follows is an unusual, persistent sequence that echoes Spielberg’s masterpiece of mass madness, close encounters of sorts. Third. It turns out that, as a large-scale action thriller director, Baumbach has the goods. Scenes of stalemate and carnage under boiling skies carry a macabre charge, while a stop at a deserted gas station carries something of the overwrought horror of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Later, Baumbach showed he could mix action with comedy in a farcical station wagon chase that could easily have pulled off a Chevy Chase movie from the period when White Noise is set. At times, Baumbach seems more instinctively attuned to the pop culture DeLillo was critiquing than DeLillo himself.

Photo: Wilson Webb/Netflix

Struggling actors, oddly enough for Baumbach, who is usually so generous with his actors, stray from the surreal grandeur of the director’s design and struggle to find rhythm in his book-set lines. Cheadle, toddling and questioning, does best in this strange world, making statements like, “She has important hair.” Driver has some great moments and his signature feats – watch the way he lifts his hand through his academic gown to push Jack’s tinted glasses up to his gorgeous nose, with a special smile – but he’s sadly wrong. At 39, he’s at least a decade too young for Jack, and even the pot belly and unnatural middle-aged patina given to him by the makeup and costume departments can’t hide his basic masculinity. You can’t buy Driver as a bumbling academic; His body does not know what it means to abort. It’s very funny, though. Driver’s intensity often leads to his comic skills being overlooked, so it’s gratifying to find a movie as far-fetched as White Noise that brings them to the fore.

The thing that annoys most DeLillo followers about Bombach may also be the thing that makes it more fun for others to watch: it’s fun. It’s a messy movie that can’t quite find the thread to understand DeLillo’s vision or the truth of his characters – particularly during the baffling final third, after the Airborne Toxic event dissipates and Jack becomes obsessed with Babette’s whereabouts on some kind of drug. Conspiracy. But it was cleverly made with an infectious taste. Baumbach bursts into laughter and fear, often successfully, spraying the screen with vivid color and movement. Under the end credits, he sets up a dance in the supermarket aisles that DeLillo and his pretentious characters imagine to be the modern American church. Is Baumbach still making his point, or is he just turning away? The latter, I suspect, and more power to him. He took the Netflix money and ran.

White Noise is out now on Netflix.

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