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.