White Noise

Noah Baum­bach is – at least at first glance – a curi­ous choice to adapt the work of Amer­i­can author Don DeLil­lo for the screen, as his stylised, com­plex and idio­syn­crat­ic prose seems vast­ly dif­fer­ent from the real­ist dia­logue that the film­mak­er tends to favour in his por­traits of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can life. But the over­ar­ch­ing theme of White Noise – an anx­i­ety around the loom­ing spec­tre of death – is famil­iar ter­ri­to­ry for for the writer/​director, as is the psy­che of the film’s mid­dle-aged, mid­dle-class white pro­tag­o­nist. This is his most ambi­tious project in both scale and provenance.

This does seem appar­ent in the film’s open­ing sequence. After Don Cheadle’s cheer­ful aca­d­e­m­ic Mur­ray Siskind deliv­ers a mono­logue on the opti­mistic over­tones of the car crash in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma, we cut to pre­em­i­nent Hitler Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Jack Glad­ney (Adam Dri­ver) and his wife Babette (Gre­ta Ger­wig) in their kitchen, sur­round­ed by a gag­gle of pre­co­cious chil­dren. They move through the space with a chore­o­graphed flu­id­i­ty; they speak not so much like peo­ple, but like char­ac­ters in a play.

There is some­thing arti­fi­cial and odd about the tableaux, with its dense­ly sat­u­rat­ed colours and Gerwig’s frizzy bouf­fant hair. But this jar­ring sen­sa­tion doesn’t last, much in the way a euphor­ic high after a bout of unbri­dled con­sumerism is only ever a fleet­ing reprieve from the impend­ing heat death of the uni­verse. The rhythms of the film soon set­tle, and it becomes an off­beat, but not unwel­come, change of pace for Baumbach.

He retains the much of the anx­ious, wry spir­it of DeLillo’s prose, but trims down many of the side plots and asides which give ​‘White Noise’ such char­ac­ter. Purists might be offend­ed, but it works in the favour of keep­ing pace. Shot dur­ing the sum­mer of 2021, it seems inevitable that com­par­isons will be drawn between the events of this film and the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic: onlook­ers the­o­rise about the caus­es and effects of the health cri­sis; masks are worn; Jack and Babette find vast­ly dif­fer­ent ways through their anx­i­eties around death. But the strength of the source mate­r­i­al (and indeed Baumbach’s exe­cu­tion) make White Noise one of the bet­ter exam­ples of ​‘pan­dem­ic art’ to emerge from this per­ilous time in history.

There’s sym­pa­thy here for how fucked up every­thing is. Baum­bach doesn’t pre­tend that he has the answers for what we do now, as we emerge blink­ing and yawn­ing into a world where we can’t afford to heat our homes. Some­times death seems like a bet­ter option – a bypass­ing of the bull­shit, so to speak. But there are brief glim­mers of a world worth stick­ing around for: the ten­der­ness of love; the plea­sures of par­ent­hood. White Noise is a sto­ry about cut­ting through the sta­t­ic and learn­ing to set­tle in silence.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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