Mark Reviews Movies: WHITE NOISE (2022)

White Noise, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 29, 2022

It's almost too easy for us to become caught up in whatever—a job, a hobby, a relationship, some random thought, a book one really appreciates, a historical figure one admires, or just what to buy during the next trip to the grocery store. Writer/director Noah Baumbach's White Noise begins with an exaggerated examination of that phenomenon, as a family and some academics go through their day-to-day routines of distractions and self-indulgent theorizing. Then, an event occurs that nobody can ignore—until it just becomes more convenient to forget about it and try to go back to the way things were.

The film, an adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, feels a bit too on-the-nose at this current moment in history, which might be what drew Baumbach, a filmmaker known mostly for his low-key character studies, to something so seemingly outside his apparent comfort zone. There's a sense of scale and purpose here that feels unique among the director's output, and if the story weren't so inherently absurd and satirical, one might see this as Baumbach's attempt to break into the mainstream.

There are scenes and moments here, revolving around the centerpiece disaster and existing as isolated setpieces out of a horror movie or a thriller, that are formally intricate and visually compelling. That something or someone within the story inevitably undermines the scope or the terror of these sequences is mostly the point. The gag, though, works, in part, because Baumbach sets up the expectations and stakes of something that seems more grounded in some kind of reality so well.

It takes a while to get to the disaster that sets the plot in motion, only for such a large-scale event to quickly become such a thing of the past that another plot has to get going. Before that, we meet Jack Gladney (Adam Driver, who really transforms himself into some lumpy, grumpy embodiment of professorial comfort and dullness), as well as his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their blended family of four kids.

Jack, by the way, is the foremost scholar in the field of "Hitler studies," a discipline he started, and is something of a star at the fictional College-on-the-Hill. Some colleagues are trying to catch up to him, such as his friend Murray (Don Cheadle), who currently teaches the glamor and glory of car crashes in American cinema but wants to specialize in "Elvis studies." At one point, the two professors get into a sort of duet of a lecture that compares each one's respective subject's childhood and mommy issues.

Obviously, we're not meant to take too much of this seriously, even as the characters debate and discuss subjects as thorny as the allure of a genocidal dictator or as universal as the fear of death. After pleasuring each other with some nighttime reading, Jack and Babette have a pillow talk session about dying—mainly how neither wants the other to die first, because the pain and loneliness would be too much. Even so, Jack has a nightmare—one of those chilling, if still slightly amusing, sequences that Baumbach treats as the real deal—about a home invader. Death is very much on his mind, occupied and distracted by so much else to keep the thought at bay.

Anyway, a truck and a train carrying toxic chemicals collide outside of the college town, sending a cloud or a plume of smoke or something worse into the sky. As the kids worry about what's going to happen, Jack keeps calm and repeatedly downplays the threat until it becomes unavoidable. The family evacuates their home and sets out to find a safe place amidst a lot of chaos, confusion, and some more absurd moments and encounters.

Baumbach pauses for some impressive shots of the airborne threat, illuminated an eerie purplish-pink by helicopters and lightning in the sky, and the looks of awe on the family members, letting us see how objectively momentous it is in the moment—for whatever that's worth later in the story (Lol Crawley's grainy cinematography gives us a sense of the period—the 1980s—and the underlying mood beneath the humor). As it turns out, the disaster isn't worth too much in the lives of these particular characters and the world at large, which goes on almost as if nothing had happened and returns to whatever normalcy they can muster. Jack is still worried about dying, even more so now, and the third act finds him looking for a cure for his fear, revenge for a personal slight, or both. Does the motive really matter, as long as it means there's something—anything, really—for him to do?

Most of this, of course, is a mere and vague description of the semblance of a plot here. That plot is both vital—in that a lot happens, including potential conspiracies and a mysterious drug that Babette is hiding and a couple car crashes or chases and a rather tense standoff in a motel room—and completely meaningless—in that everything really is just something for these characters to do as they avoid wrestling with and thinking about the one thing that's a guarantee in life. More important, though, is how Baumbach balances the tones of such superficially important sequences or sights and the humor of these self-centered, oblivious characters, dancing around (literally during the end credits) existential dread and whatever is driving it.

It's a lot, to downplay what Baumbach is attempting with White Noise. For the most part, the filmmaker achieves something, too—even if it's only to remind us that the meaning of something or nothing is whatever we make of it.

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