White Noise

WHITE NOISE   ***

Noah Baumbach

2022

IDEA:  In a small college town in Ohio, a professor of Hitler studies and his family face various existential threats, most notably an "airborne toxic event" caused by a nearby train crash.

BLURB:  It’s a pleasure to see Noah Baumbach expand his visual and thematic repertoire with White Noise, his most ambitious project yet and one that significantly deviates from the modest scopes of his films until now. His first work of adaptation, it pushes him into exciting new territory as both a writer and director, and evinces his aptitude for a kind of large-scale action choreography that has heretofore been latent in his chatty domestic dramedies. At the same time, the film - with its white bourgeois malaise and neurotic intellectual banter - is Baumbach to a T. He finds an ideal spiritual collaborator in Don DeLillo, whose novel speaks the filmmaker’s mordantly philosophical language of anxiety. Baumbach’s White Noise feels particularly resonant in our current pandemic era, when the proliferation of (mis)information via mass media has exacerbated a culture of fear and ignorance, things paradoxically answered by a further retreat into mass media and consumerism. The purgatorial transactional spaces of DeLillo’s novel are vividly realized in Jess Gonchor’s production design, including the polished homogeneity of the supermarket, where death is deferred by purchasing power. The saying goes that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” and White Noise wryly agrees, the only constants in its aleatory world being the colorful brand names festooning the mise-en-scène, all as ineradicable as the glowing Shell sign that can’t be erased even by the toxic cloud that infects Adam Driver’s bumbling Jack. He and his brood attempt to control the chaos of life through rationality and knowledge, but what’s actually knowledge and what’s just unfettered information? With winsome irreverence, Baumbach unites us in the comfort of our shared epistemological uncertainty.

Top 10 - 2022

 

Were the films of 2022 unconsciously trying to revive the excesses of the Roaring Twenties? One title, the 189-minute bacchanal that is Babylon, actually took place then. An atypical number of other Hollywood titles flirted with or stretched past the three-hour mark: Avatar: The Way of Water, The Batman, Blonde, TÁR, Elvis. There was also the crossover Tollywood sensation RRR adding a further epic dose of maximalism to the year's cinematic landscape. Meanwhile, the 139-minute Everything Everywhere All at Once delivered on its title with a deliberately overstuffed, enervating/innervating cornucopia of genre-trotting action. Maybe it was high time to indulge in the wake (can we call it that?) of pandemic-era deprivations and sociopolitical unease. Of course, 2022 offered plenty of smaller-scaled gems as well, many of which proved more enriching than their distended counterparts.

My top ten films of the year are after the jump:

No Bears

NO BEARS   ***1/2

Jafar Panahi

2022

IDEA:  Jafar Panahi, playing a version of himself, directs a film remotely while holed up in a small town on the Iranian border. As he does so, he becomes embroiled in a scandal among the locals.

BLURB:  Under draconian state persecution – entailing a travel ban and a nominal ban on filmmaking – Jafar Panahi has for over a decade maintained a resilient, thriving creative spirit that inspires nothing short of awe. No Bears is another of his intrepid, formally frisky acts of political defiance whose sheer existence signifies the triumph of art over oppressive regimes. Panahi specifically embraces the power of fiction storytelling to sublimate anger and protest while exposing and amplifying truths that reality itself tries to conceal. In No Bears, he has leveraged the conditions of his privation to imagine a parable, at once sly and straightforward, of both his own persecution and that of so many others living in Iran. Here his character is, essentially himself, perched in sociopolitical limbo in a rural border town, forced to direct his film remotely via Zoom. Meanwhile, he is increasingly hounded by the authorities for a photograph he might have taken, one that agitates the village’s entrenched religious customs. Crafty in his articulation of space, Panahi uses his filmmaking to capture and obliterate the borders set up around him. His camera moves seamlessly from Turkey to Iran through a laptop screen; social hierarchies are dissolved in his Bazinian wide shots and democratic delegation of cinematography; even the doorways he’s pervasively framing seem structurally tenuous. But borders do exist, and they can be intransigent. Panahi’s character learns this the hard way as his best intentions yield bloodshed, the power of his status as an image-maker inadvertently opening himself and others up to real harm. As frequently playful and funny as it is, No Bears ends with a bleakness that suggests someone realizing they may have finally run out of road.