Noah Baumbach (USA: 2022, 136 min.)

From the director who has presented audiences throughout his career with character studies and family dramas investigating the bottomless philosophies (or lack thereof) of the upper middle class urban artist, one would assume White Noise written by Don DeLillo in 1985 is a book that someone like Grover (Kicking and Screaming) or Bernard Berkman (The Squid and the Whale) or any other faux-intellectual from his œuvre would provide an unsolicited breakdown of to an unsuspecting bar patron. But alas, White Noise (2022) is not the topic of a drunken monologue from an unemployed college graduate or divorced author penned by Baumbach, but rather the newest film from the auteur himself working with the first adapted screenplay of his career. Baumbach’s effort to even venture into the mind’s eye of Don DeLillo is admirable, even if flawed, as the novel has been famously deemed the ‘unadaptable adaptation’ for the singularly fluid tonal balance DeLillo employs in his examination of society between reality, near-reality, and the human behavior that operates across this bridge. It is exactly in this tertiary space between the systemic and the personal, the spectacle and the conspiracy, the cerebral and the physical that Baumbach attempts to weave his narrative through, pursuing a delicate balance that is seemingly impossible to achieve in camera. Against all odds, the film, with the help of the limitless charisma of its cast and skillful accomplishments of its crew, is ultimately formidable in its capturing of the existential blender that is its source material but is simultaneously burdened by the weight of its own experiment.

The film follows Professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a world-renowned Hitler Studies scholar, his friend and colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and his family as they navigate everything from grocery store chewing gum quibbles to extramarital pharmaceutical affairs to catastrophic level airborne toxic events. Divided into three sections, the film stays true to the structure of DeLillo’s novel, first plunging straight into the postmodern 80’s aesthetic paired with the frantic musings on mortality before dramatic tonal shifts maneuver the film head-on into the disaster movie genre and return in the third act to recenter the thesis at the core of the novel’s satirical message that in a world inundated with distraction, nothing can distract us from the universal fact of death. The fear of this inevitability and the anxiety it induces is a throughline across the story, although each act jockeys for position between death’s visibility, potency, and immediacy, but it’s the performances that keep this precarious ship of satire afloat.

Baumbach regulars Driver and Gerwig are proven connoisseurs of the deliriously deadpan dialogue, but even with their expertise in grounding the spectacle of apocalypse into subtly nuanced meditations on mortality, the additions of the family’s children spanning eight cumulative marriages add another level of vitality to the trademark Baumbach-ian family dramatics. Each character has their own unique ways of confronting the irony of their own existence: Denise (Raffey Cassidy) leading the charge on the investigation of Babette’s mystery medicine, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) constantly examining the terminology of the black smoke hurling toward their suburban safety net. Is it a plume? No, it’s a feathery plume. No! It’s a black billowing cloud! Nevertheless, it’s undeniably Driver’s show and he proves the continued collaboration between this trio dating back to Frances Ha (2012) is a one-of-a-kind artistic force. His mannerisms range from the absurd to the bizarre, culminating most effectively in an intellectual duel on Elvis and Hitler that catapults into precisely the type of blockbuster ordeal that defines the zeitgeist of this 80’s era supersizing of “event.” These endeavors only scratch the surface of the lengths these characters will go to traipse around the core fundamentals of their internalized crises, an act of timeless suppression Baumbach and DeLillo would likely bet that their audience is currently doing themselves perusing the sea of Netflix content before, for better or worse, landing on this cinematic grappling of the mundane mixed up in the mysteries of the cosmos.

White Noise is weird and wonderful in almost all the right ways. Baumbach is clearly operating at the scale of an epic, something he hasn’t approached yet in his career, yet still manages to maintain the idiosyncratic chemistry and scholarly aloofness that we expect from his screenplays. Adept in his first adaptation despite the insurmountable magnitude of his chosen source material, the screenplay deals with themes that reflect the outsized scale of the production approaching inquiry into mortality, consumerism, and ethics with humor, sincerity, and wit. The film soars in moments driven by Elfman’s score, and although it may never quite live up to legacy of DeLillo’s original work, the ambition of the adaptation in conjunction with the commitment of the performances do more than enough to compensate. Gerwig has moments to shine in the final chapter with a monologue that speaks life back into a meandering third act (although her hair is important throughout), that struggles to reframe and make sense of the wild kinetics and conversational fluid dynamics of the first two chapters.

Although Driver, Gerwig, and the entire ensemble work overtime to wrangle with the wrath of intertwining genres and existential maximalism, the vibrantly idealized production design backdrop has an equal presence in the characterization of the film flooding the screen with a vibrant saturation that heightens the uncanny dissonance between reality and our own neurotic, media-fueled, pill-popping perceptions of it. No moment dials into this perilous scaffold between quirkiness and ironic authenticity quite like the grocery store set featuring a closing end-credits dance number set to a James Murphy original “new body rhumba” worth the price of admission alone. The pulsating rhythms of LCD Soundsystem’s first new song in five years pair with upbeat lyrics circumnavigating death and the stylized choreography of grocery store routine consumerism to form the film’s most effective metaphor. While the register and scope of White Noise may seem unfamiliar to the filmography of Noah Baumbach, the cadence of the film’s metaphysical dissection of middle-class urban milieu still activates many trademarks of the director’s style, and much like the characters in the film itself, offers a distraction from our own realities for 136 minutes. Not everything in this runtime works, but Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and their film family dancing down the cereal aisle absolutely does.