Every now and then, even the most perceptive of filmmakers will back off from telling you a story to press you into a corner and bore you about some book they’ve always loved. “Bore” is too strong a word for Noah Baumbach’s fitful – sometimes funny, sometimes mad, sometimes flaccid – take on a 1985 postmodern classic by Don DeLillo.
It is hard to shake thoughts of what Paul Thomas Anderson (a near-exact contemporary of Baumbach) did with another postmodern novel by Thomas Pynchon (a near-exact contemporary of DeLillo). Both the current project and Anderson’s Inherent Vice just about make sense of themselves without shaking the impression that no sane director would attempt either story if it weren’t based on Long-Cherished Project by AN Author. There are good jokes. It looks sumptuous. It doesn’t feel entirely comfortable on screen.
White Noise does some yelling at the recently late Jean-Luc Godard. A near-opening shot of snarled cars offers flavours of the Frenchman’s Weekend that are enhanced later when proper automotive panic sets in. Lol Crawley’s deafening cinematography deals in the same bold colours Raoul Coutard plastered across Pierrot le Fou and Le Mepris. But one senses that, presented with such a source, Godard would have torn it to shreds and put it back together in mad disorder.
Early on, as we watch Jack Gladney (tubbied-up Adam Driver), professor of Hitler studies, lecture a class at College-on-the-Hill, we do indeed get promising po-mo inserts of archival video. But Baumbach’s script goes on to take a largely linear, largely conventional path through some notably unconventional situations. The whole thing needs a vigorous shake.
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The narrative concerns an escape of toxic waste that points up the stresses in a midwestern family at a college town. Jack is worried that students may discover he doesn’t speak a word of German. Babette (well-permed Greta Gerwig), his wife, is slipping into secret pharmaceutical dependency. Their children land all across the spectrum of neuroses.
One day a train crashes and unleashes a mass of deadly vapour. The screenplay retains much of DeLillo’s delightfully sly prose including the famous media obfuscations about the nature of the threat. At first it is “feathery plume”. Then it is a “black billowing cloud”. Finally it is classed as an “airborne toxic event”.
Or course, we know it is really Death. If White Noise is about anything it is about what comes to us all and how we seek to deny that imminent void. The title references Jack’s musing that death might be “nothing but sound”. The children know the cloud is a threat but the parents have learnt to rationalise it into irrelevancy (until they can’t manage that any more).
The visuals are always striking, even if one wonders to what end. The obsession with mid-century packaging – particularly that of cereal boxes – offers more opportunities for Crawley to shoot primary colours but, 70 years after the high period of pop art and a few decades after such images became a staple of music video, the endless blizzard of Tide, Birds Eye and Cheerios fails to sweep in any fresh insights.
The costumiers and make-up folk have worked hard on Gerwig and Driver, but both still look dressed-up for a particularly boring Halloween Party – the former as 1980s Deirdre Barlow, the latter as recovering trainspotter. Setting up a colleague’s chemistry lab like the workplace of Jerry Lewis’s Nutty Professor promises more raw fun than Baumbach is prepared to countenance.
What saves White Noise from complete descent into Long-Cherished Project Hell are the consistent prangs of skewering black humour. In that regard, Baumbach has been right to remain reasonably faithful to the text (though the film veers away from DeLillo in its later stages). The digs about mid-century alienation still land with uncomfortable incisiveness. Few film adaptations so awkwardly aligned deliver quite so many full-on belly laughs. It doesn’t exactly work but, no, we won’t throw “bore” at the filmmakers.
Anyway, it is worth deciding for yourself in cinemas before White Noise makes its way to Netflix at the end of the month.
