Noah Baumbach will adapt White Noise with Adam… | Little White Lies

Incoming

Noah Baum­bach will adapt White Noise with Adam Dri­ver and Gre­ta Gerwig

14 Jan 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

A man in a suit holding a large video camera on a tripod, with a small monitor attached to the camera.
A man in a suit holding a large video camera on a tripod, with a small monitor attached to the camera.
He’ll join a small cadre of film­mak­ers who have tak­en a whack at the prose of Don DeLillo.

The prose of Don DeLil­lo, wrapped up in men­tal inte­ri­or­i­ty and post­mod­ern abstrac­tion as it is, presents a lot of the same chal­lenges inher­ent in adapt­ing Thomas Pyn­chon. Accord­ing­ly, the two men don’t have much of a pres­ence in the film world, with one major adap­ta­tion each from an ambi­tious auteur. (DeLil­lo has David Cro­nen­bers Cos­mopo­lis, and Pyn­chon has Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inher­ent Vice.)

A major rev­e­la­tion yes­ter­day will kick DeLillo’s count up to two, as a list­ing in Pro­duc­tion Week­ly qui­et­ly broke the news that Noah Baum­bach will tack­le the land­mark nov­el White Noise for his next fea­ture. Baum­bach, a film­mak­er expe­ri­enced with com­pli­cat­ed lit­er­ary projects, seems like an ide­al match with one of the writ­ers most known for unfilmable” work.

He’ll pre­sum­ably draw on the same chops he brought to his unaired TV series of Jonathan Franzen’s nov­el The Cor­rec­tions for the new film, anoth­er tale of mid­dle-aged neu­ro­sis and Amer­i­can nation­al themes. In White Noise, a col­lege pro­fes­sor of Hitler stud­ies (Adam Dri­ver, return­ing to Baum­bach after they col­lab­o­rat­ed on Mar­riage Sto­ry) starts to come undone, much to the con­ster­na­tion of his wife (Gre­ta Ger­wig, who also hap­pens to be Baumbach’s real-life wife) and chil­dren. The arrival of an Air­borne Tox­ic Event” cov­er­ing his town in a dead­ly black chem­i­cal cloud doesn’t help matters.

That omi­nous por­tent does get at the novel’s main the­sis about how every­day life in the lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry poi­sons us all in small, imper­cep­ti­ble ways, whether through the intel­lec­tu­al solip­sism of cam­pus cul­ture or the more lit­er­al tox­ins of then-feared mood-alter­ing med­ica­tion. It’s a heady med­i­ta­tion on moder­ni­ty, the sort of sweep­ing artis­tic state­ment not so eas­i­ly wres­tled into the shape of a movie.

But between the sup­port of his clos­est col­lab­o­ra­tors at his side, and a unique apti­tude for blend­ing dry humor with mis­ery-fueled dra­ma, Baum­bach will be more than up to the chal­lenge. As some of my col­leagues have already joked, White Noise’ dou­bles as an accu­rate descrip­tion of every film he has made thus far.

You might like