Dec 30, 2022 · A daring adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel by Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. The film explores themes of death, consumerism, and trauma in three acts, with a mix of satire, drama, and disaster. ... Rated: 7/10 Jul 21, 2024 Full Review Yasmine Kandil Discussing Film If anything, White Noise shows that being overtly faithful to a pre-existing source from another medium can fundamentally lead ... ... Nov 23, 2022 · White Noise” is a frequently funny movie that is also utterly in earnest. The kids do say the darnedest things, but they are also vessels of anxiety and avatars of vulnerability. ... White Noise is a mumblecore indie film with a Spielbergian disaster at its core. It’s grander than anything Baumbach has done before, and may likely do again. The film is a biting satire of our ... ... Nov 25, 2022 · White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo. ... Dec 30, 2022 · Filmmaker Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s “unfilmable” satire tackling Hitler, Big Pharma and consumerism for Netflix, streaming Dec. 30. ... Dec 31, 2022 · Instead, White Noise debuted at this year’s fancy film festivals to mostly tepid reviews. It’s arriving online rather quietly, as an end-of-year oddity rather than an instant magnum opus. ... Aug 31, 2022 · White NoiseReview: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins. ... Dec 30, 2022 · White Noise is now on Netflix. UPDATE: Dec. 19, 2022, 11:07 a.m. EST White Noise was reviewed out of the 60th New York Film Festival on October 12, 2022. This review has been republished, tied the ... ... Dec 30, 2022 · Adapted from the beloved 1985 Don DeLillo novel, White Noise is a baffling, uneven, sporadically enthralling movie about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a dry run for the end of the ... ... ">

White Noise

white noise movie review

Death unites us all. And societies are shaped by not just the dread of that inevitable outcome but the common manners in which we push those existential thoughts aside. Consumerism, conspiracy theories, and collective trauma collide in Noah Baumbach’s daring adaptation of a novel that may have been published in the mid-’80s but undeniably speaks to the issues that continue to dominate our culture in the 2020s. A story of a family unmoored from their already fragile existence by an airborne toxic event has relevance to the COVID era that author Don DeLillo couldn’t have imagined specifically. Yet, the source material here is designed to speak to a larger sense of trauma and fear—elements that will never go away as long as that pesky Grim Reaper remains in our lives. Baumbach’s adaptation of “White Noise” unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there’s more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn’t necessarily consider matches. Life is full of surprises, right?

“White Noise” opens with a professor named Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) speaking of the comfort of car crashes on film. Like every choice in this script, it’s not an accident. Siskind speaks of the simplicity of the car crash, noting how it cuts through character and plotting to something that’s easily understood and relatable. It foreshadows the mid-section of a film that will play essentially like a disaster movie, asking viewers to imagine what they would do if stuck in the same situation. And it’s a set-up for another fascinating aspect of “White Noise”—a commentary on crowd catharsis. We are at peace when we see others doing the same thing we are doing, whether it’s watching a car crash in a movie, attending an Elvis concert, or buying things we don’t need at an A&P grocery store.

Someone who keenly understands groupthink is Professor Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), one of the world experts on Hitler Studies, even though he’s embarrassed that he doesn’t speak German. The first act—and the film is divided into three parts on-screen—could be called a satire of academia as Gladney, Siskind, and their colleague use big words to help get a grip on big problems. Jack and his wife Babbette ( Greta Gerwig ) have a blended family that includes the anxiety-prone Denise ( Raffey Cassidy ), problem-solving Heinrich ( Sam Nivola ), and two more children. Babbette has forgotten things lately, and Denise notices a new prescription bottle for a drug called Dylar. This is an everyday American family—going through the motions of life as they try to push away the issues that have dogged philosophers for eons, like the meaning of it all and how to stop thinking about when it ends. In one of the best early scenes, a comment about how happy they are leads Babbette and Jack into a conversation about who should die first. 

While death is a concern in the first act of “White Noise,” it becomes more tactile in the second act, titled “The Airborne Toxic Event.” A train crash at the edge of town sends chemicals flying into the sky, and everyone in the Gladney family except Jack panics. As he tries to defuse the situation, Denise becomes convinced that she’s sick already, and Henrich obsessively listens to news reports. Before long, they’re on the road in a mass evacuation, and one of Baumbach’s most impressive technical achievements unfolds, capturing a family on the run from the unknown.

Without spoiling the final act completely, it re-centers the Gladneys back at home, but with death a much more present reality in Jack’s mind. Unfortunately, as the intensity rises, “White Noise” loses some of its impact, especially in a few talky scenes near the end that betray the tone of the first half. Yes, the film always deals with “serious” subjects, but it gets rocky when they take center stage, and the tone struggles to merge satire and marital drama. DeLillo’s book was notoriously called “unfilmable” for decades, and it feels like this last act is where that’s most apparent.

Thankfully, Baumbach has two of his most reliable collaborators to keep it from going off the rails. Driver is, once again, excellent here, crafting a performance that is often very funny without relying on broad character beats. There’s a version of this character that’s pitched to eleven—the awkward academic forced into trying to keep his family alive despite his inferior skill set—but Driver gives a performance that’s often very subtle even as everything around him is going broad. Gerwig is a little oddly mannered early in the film, but that makes sense for a character who becomes somewhat unmoored before the air around her becomes toxic.

To unpack this epic of existential dread, Baumbach has assembled a team that deserves mention. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (“ Vox Lux “) finds the right balance between realism and parody in his camera work, giving much of the film an exaggerated look amplified by Jess Gonchor’s ace production design. The A&P here, with its bright colors and shelves of identical items, is not quite reality, but it’s close enough to make its point, and the chaotic sequences of panic in the mid-section have the energy of a CGI blockbuster. Finally, Danny Elfman’s score is one of the best of the year, connecting the three tonally different sections.

What does it all mean? Why do we take pills, buy junk, and watch car crashes to escape our fears? The phenomenal A&P dance sequence that ends “White Noise” lands a key theme in a fascinating way—we may all just be buying colorful stuff we don’t need to distract ourselves from reality, but let’s at least try to have fun while we’re doing it.

In limited theatrical release now. On Netflix on December 30 th .

white noise movie review

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

white noise movie review

  • Adam Driver as Jack Gladney
  • Greta Gerwig as Babbette
  • Raffey Cassidy as Denise
  • Sam Nivola as Heinrich
  • May Nivola as Steffie
  • Don Cheadle as Murray Siskind
  • Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards
  • André 3000 as Elliot Lasher
  • Lars Eidinger as Arlo Shell
  • Danny Elfman

Writer (based on the book by)

  • Don DeLillo

Cinematographer

  • Lol Crawley
  • Matthew Hannam
  • Noah Baumbach

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‘White Noise’ Review: Toxic Events, Airborne and Domestic

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel is a campus comedy, a domestic drama and an allegory of contemporary American life.

  • Share full article

In a scene from “White Noise,” several members of the Gladney family are in a room lit by greenish-yellow light. The father, at center, wears a busy patterned shirt.

By A.O. Scott

Late in “White Noise,” after the ecological disaster known as the “airborne toxic event,” on the heels of a professional triumph, and in the throes of marital woe, Jack and Babette engage in a discussion of religion with an acerbic German nun. Instead of piety, she offers a pragmatic, borderline cynical view of how faith operates. If she and her colleagues “did not pretend to believe these things,” she says — referring to “old beliefs” in stuff like heaven and hell — “the world would collapse.”

The nun, played by the formidable Barbara Sukowa, has been carefully airlifted from the pages of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel into Noah Baumbach’s new film. So have Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who head up a rambunctious blended family in a Midwestern college town. Jack, known in academia by the decorative initials J.A.K., is the founder of the college’s department of Hitler Studies. Babette teaches life skills to the elderly and infirm.

Back to Sister Hermann Marie: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else in the world takes seriously,” she says. This may or may not be true of nuns, but it can often feel glumly applicable to writers and filmmakers, especially those who try to chart an independent course. Somebody has to care about art and literature. With respect to DeLillo, Baumbach is very much a believer. His “White Noise” is a credible adaptation and a notably faithful one — what an earlier Baumbach character might call the filet of DeLillo’s bristling, gristly book. Very little has been added, and what’s been taken out will be missed only by fanatics. (A warning and maybe a spoiler for DeLillo-heads: The most photographed barn in America is nowhere to be seen.)

The challenges inherent in the project are bravely faced and honorably met. The novel straddles domestic realism and speculative satire. It’s a campus comedy stapled to a family drama and tied up with a ribbon of allegory. Its contemporary topics — no less relevant now than in the ’80s — include intellectual fashion, pharmacological folly, environmental destruction and rampant consumerism. These collide with eternal themes: envy, love, the fear of death.

Baumbach’s reverence for the material is evident from the trompe l’oeil opening sequence — footage of car crashes from old movies, accompanying a lecture by a professor of popular culture — through the end credits, which turn DeLillo’s vision of supermarket heaven into a bouncy LCD Soundsystem music video. Driver, paunchy and swaybacked, is the very model of a modern middle-aged professor, his intellectual curiosity muffled by a certain complacency. He’s a happy man whose vocation is horror.

In the campus lunchroom, he sits in on bull sessions with colleagues, inhaling gusts of competitive explanation. The movie’s dialogue, compulsively true to DeLillo, bristles with explanations and random facts. Except for the toddler, the kids in the Gladney household — Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and his daughter, Steffie (May Nivola); Babette’s daughter, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) — bounce around the kitchen like human Google results pages, asking out-of-left-field questions and citing semi-relevant data. Jack and his pal Murray (Don Cheadle), the car-crash scholar looking to expand his academic portfolio, are more inclined to hermeneutics. In one of Baumbach’s bravura set pieces, they improvise a classroom duet for an audience of rapt undergraduates, comparing and contrasting mother-love and the death drive in Hitler and Elvis.

What they have to say sounds pretty dubious — Murray and Jack broadcast the kind of mock-profundity more common among students than faculty — and the question is to what extent that’s deliberate. “White Noise” is a frequently funny movie that is also utterly in earnest.

The kids do say the darnedest things, but they are also vessels of anxiety and avatars of vulnerability. The wounds and salves of family life, in particular the abrasions of matrimony, are Baumbach’s specialty. Jack and Babette’s particular marriage story, which comes into focus in the final third of the movie and is tied up with a noirish pharmaceutical subplot, is the heart of “White Noise” — rawer and sweeter than the surrounding material. Driver and Gerwig give warmth and texture to characters who were, in DeLillo’s pages, a little abstract. Their function was largely to organize the novel’s ideas.

The status of those ideas is the biggest problem with Baumbach’s film. He is perhaps too dutiful in transcribing DeLillo’s vision of contemporary life, a landscape of material comfort and intellectual dread, dominated by brand names, untrustworthy information and the looming threat of destruction.

Random insights, like Murray’s observation that the family is the origin of misinformation, are preserved as if they were museum pieces in a carefully curated historical exhibit. Making “White Noise” a period film — the uncannily precise ’80s environment is the work of Jess Gonchor, the production designer, and Ann Roth, who did the costumes — inevitably blunts its impact. Things that might have made readers squirm in the 1980s are shrouded in nostalgia in 2022. It’s hard to feel existential terror when you’re ogling the A.&P. supermarket, the landline phones, the printed classified ads and the boat-shaped rear-wheel-drive station wagons.

Within this world, you can see premonitions of our own, most notably in an evacuation shelter where anxious people create in effect an IRL prototype of Twitter, gathering around unverified experts (including Jack’s son, Heinrich) and parroting their wisdom. Baumbach, working on a larger scale than he has before, pulls off a few fine cinematic coups, one of them involving that station wagon fording a swollen stream.

But there is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. “White Noise” is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.

White Noise Rated R. The fear of death. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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White Noise Reviews

white noise movie review

Baumbach manages to transform this strange portrait of American numbness, consumerism, and soul-searching into something intimate.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 18, 2024

white noise movie review

Baumbach captures the novel’s emphasis on death and society’s attitude towards it.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 21, 2024

white noise movie review

If anything, White Noise shows that being overtly faithful to a pre-existing source from another medium can fundamentally lead to a film’s downfall.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 17, 2024

white noise movie review

It is never completely all together, but allows itself to be so free and playful about the bindings of its genres that when the end-credits sequence appears, you’re absolutely convinced that [White Noise] is worthy of such a credits sequence

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 4, 2024

Instead of something that speaks directly to the present, it’s a period piece... There’s not much fun in a film where everyone’s just looking at Twitter. But without its eerie relevance, it’s not quite clear why this film even exists.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

At its best, Noah Baumbach’s impressive and thoroughly decent adaptation of White Noise interestingly discusses people’s relatable ownership of secrets yet complete inability to internalize them.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The banter and responses between Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig were so sharp, witty, and brilliant that if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they were married in real life.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

white noise movie review

Not only do these numerous subplots fail to cohere into an actual story, but each is approached with such detachment that it feels like you're watching them unfold through several miles of plexiglass via a telescope from the other side of the galaxy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 16, 2023

white noise movie review

Fans unfamiliar with the novel may be disappointed that the film does not feel like a Baumbach film – without credits, it could be mistaken for Wes Anderson – and find the story pulls punches in the end when it feel like more oomph is needed.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The movie limits itself to its title, that is, it remains within the "noise" and doesn't get to the "background" of the themes it satirizes, specifically fear. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

Admirers of Baumbach will smile at the ways in which White Noise embodies his longtime preoccupations and simultaneously points toward bold new possibilities...

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

white noise movie review

White Noise is a mumblecore indie film with a Spielbergian disaster at its core. It’s grander than anything Baumbach has done before, and may likely do again. The film is a biting satire of our times, plucked out of the 1980s.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

white noise movie review

There might be occasions where you see Bambach struggling with the hefty source material, but, in conclusion, he delivers a worthy adaptation filled with empathy and dismay, both in captivating equal measures.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

white noise movie review

White Noise is a film that absolutely shouldn’t work, and yet it does.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2023

white noise movie review

While frustrating that it cant’ quite replicate the enjoyable messiness of its first hour across its whole runtime, White Noise is an enjoyable swing from all involved, a complete departure from Noah Baumbach’s previous work

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2023

white noise movie review

An unforgettable movie about family, disasters, consumerism, addiction, and finding meaning in surprising places.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 28, 2023

white noise movie review

White Noise pretends to depict America in the middle of a waking nightmare, but it’s a privileged person’s nightmare.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2023

white noise movie review

something of a mess, but in a great, enthralling, engaging kind of way

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2023

white noise movie review

Even amid the hijinks, an affecting score from Danny Elfman, and the instantly catchy LCD Soundsystem song that ties the chaos together, White Noise can’t sustain itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2023

white noise movie review

DeLillo’s story may be almost 40 years old, but in the wake of the pandemic it has taken on a new resonance.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2023

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‘White Noise’: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s American Nightmare

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

What exactly is Noah Baumbach up to in White Noise ? The movie, which received a very limited theatrical release ahead of premiering December 30 on Netflix , is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s canonical postmodern novel from 1985. It’s been an intriguing prospect since it was announced because the celebrated writer/director would, at face value, seem to be a mismatch for the material. Baumbach’s milieu has tended to belong less to the eerily affected, consumerist crisis-world of DeLillo’s book than to the world of people who’d feel an obligation to have read that book. White Noise makes more sense as a book you can expect to see on Baumbach characters’ shelves.

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Baumbach wiggles his way into that tension by rendering White Noise into a mashup of popular American Eighties styles, both high and low: the popcorny ensemble adventure, the sitcom, the Reagan-era adult prestige drama. He’s faithful enough to the shape and feel of those styles for us to notice not only when he moves between them, but for us to recognize that we, too, are a step removed from reality. We aren’t watching a simple, nostalgic tribute to the Eighties. We’re watching a movie that’s just off-center enough, just willing enough to announce itself as an approximation, that the era feels like a distant but easily consumed media memory. Even the disastrous toxic cloud that confronts this family feels referential. It’s sort of beautiful: astonishingly gloomy, a roiling gray mess with pink-purple shocks of lightning stuttering through it. We’re watching a movie called White Noise . But that cloud is straight out of Ghostbusters . 

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Baumbach overreaches in White Noise . The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured. Even a captivating monologue-confession by Gerwig, which anchors the dreary latter half of the movie, can’t quite push the project out of its sudden snooziness, a long spell where the kinetic sense of talk gets purposefully tamped down. There are ideas in the movie’s most spectacular failures, nevertheless. They aren’t always DeLillo’s ideas, to the extent that this is even a reasonable expectation. But the movie is always doing something — even if it isn’t always onto something. 

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The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of White Noise

The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat?

A car of screaming people in "White Noise"

Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure.

Baumbach has made two of the best movies of his career for Netflix, and the cast he’s assembled here—including Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle—is top-notch. Given all of this, plus the fact that his source material is a near-canonical piece of literature, one might figure White Noise for an awards juggernaut, or at least a solid contender. Instead, White Noise debuted at this year’s fancy film festivals to mostly tepid reviews . It’s arriving online rather quietly, as an end-of-year oddity rather than an instant magnum opus.

White Noise is without a doubt a carefully made movie that tries gamely to give flesh to the unsettling spirit of DeLillo’s work, which many have deemed “ unadaptable ” over the years. I think that label is a little overstated, and Baumbach apparently does, too, because he’s imposed a fairly clear three-act structure and given the film a soaring score by Danny Elfman that crosses eerie synths with Aaron Copland–esque grandeur. The adaptation takes the tale of a 1980s family dealing with the aftermath of a local chemical accident and gives it the vibe of a classic Amblin movie. Of course, that dissonance is part of the novel’s parody, too, and maybe why White Noise feels so confounding—though not unrewarding—to watch.

Read: ‘That’s just like White Noise .’

DeLillo’s story takes stock of the hyper-capitalism of mid-’80s America. It deconstructs the bucolic lives of the successful academic Jack Gladney (played by Driver in the film) and his wife, Babette (Gerwig). Unable to enjoy the suburban splendor around them, they fixate on their fears of death and vain attempts at self-improvement. Baumbach does his best to infuse his film with mundane dread, but for the viewer, existential horror can be easily confused with a lack of energy.

A family shopping in a grocery store in "White Noise"

Still, White Noise ’s first act is filled with the kind of snappy, overlapping dialogue Baumbach excels at. Jack fends off the sarcastic children in his blended family, works to learn German to lend legitimacy to his post as a professor of “Hitler studies,” and assists his fellow academic Murray Siskind (Cheadle), who’s attempting to launch a similar department centered on Elvis Presley. In one virtuoso sequence, Jack and Murray deliver simultaneous Hitler and Elvis lectures to the same rapt audience, trading back and forth on two very different 20th-century personality cults. Baumbach’s visual fluidity, and his camera’s awed dance around the lecture hall, is a joy to behold, given that he’s tended to work on a smaller scale.

That sequence crosscuts with a train accident that releases a deadly cloud of chemicals into the atmosphere—the catastrophic “airborne toxic event” that makes all of Jack and Babette’s fears of mortality suddenly feel much more urgent. Here, the film comes alive beyond its knowing satire; Baumbach wisely makes the ensuing terror a massive, nearly hour-long set piece—by far his loftiest thrill ride yet. The Gladney family watches the news with mounting concern, and then eventually hits the road along with everyone else in town. After getting caught in a miserably long traffic jam, they proceed to a quarantine center, where every directive from the government is as baffling as it is hopelessly mismanaged. It’s funny and surprisingly unnerving stuff.

The film also manages to feel contemporary without ever dropping the throwback aesthetic. Baumbach knows he’s making this movie for an audience that has suffered its own airborne toxic event, and he brings out little panicked details that ring uncomfortably true. Jack’s initial efforts to downplay the size of the disaster, both to reassure his children and himself, are heartbreakingly relatable. Though much of the ensuing drama pokes fun at Jack’s absurd efforts to be the family’s protective alpha male, Driver is terrific at conveying the joke without entirely losing his character to it.

White Noise ’s final act, in which the Gladneys try to return to their normal lives, is the toughest knot to untangle. For its challenging conclusion, the book intentionally goes inward, delving further into Jack and Babette’s insecurities. Baumbach, however, can’t switch from the film’s exaggerated tone to something more personal. The last showdown is loaded with sentiment but still painfully arch, which is probably why the film should be remembered simply as a curiosity—a fascinating adaptation that cannot overcome the scathing ridicule built into its source material. In this potentially waning age of prestige projects underwritten by Netflix, I certainly understand why Baumbach leapt to the challenge of making White Noise . Unfortunately, a graceful ending eluded him.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes

In this prophetic/topical/overly-spelled-out fable, Adam Driver, as an entitled professor, and Greta Gerwig, as his haunted pill-popping wife, lead a college-town clan on a collision course with disaster.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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In the early scenes, one recognizes, and responds with jittery pleasure, to the Baumbach touch. “White Noise” is set in a cozy leafy college town, which has grown up around a small liberal-arts school called The-College-on-the-Hill, and that makes the movie an ideal vehicle for the kind of high-spirited disputatious chatter that Baumbach is a wizard at. The central character, Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), teaches at the college, where he has pioneered an entire discipline devoted to Hitler Studies — which sounds like a Woody Allen joke, except that the film, like Jack, takes it all quite seriously. Jack isn’t just teaching about Hitler; he’s the excavator of the dictator’s soul, a rhapsodist of fascism.

Jack’s wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), has hair that looks like an ’80s perm (though in fact it’s natural) as well as an attitude that’s spiky enough to balance his exultant narcissism, and she pops mysterious pharmaceutical pills on the sly. They’ve each been married three times before, and between them they’ve got a reasonably well-adjusted brood of broken-home children: the sharp teenager Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and her sweet younger sister Steffie (May Nivola), who are Babette’s daughters, the chip-off-the-old-block brilliant talker Heinrich (Sam Nivola), who is Jack’s son, and a young son who is both of theirs. They’re like the Brady Bunch with a touch of the Sopranos, and Baumbach, for a while, keeps the family dialogue humming.

He also introduces us to Jack’s academic colleagues, who are treated as gently cracked without being mocked, notably Murray (Don Cheadle), who is some sort of American Studies professor with a profound take on the cheesiest dimensions of American society. He thinks that supermarkets are a deep form of nirvana, and the film opens with his lecture, illustrated by a dazzling montage of film clips, on the meaning of the car crash in Hollywood cinema, which he views as a pure expression of joy (and genius). In a way, this sets the tone for all that follows. It lets us know that “White Noise” is going to be, on some level, about violence and catastrophe, and that it’s going to regard those things with a funny and ironic sidelong eye.

The first clue that we’re watching more than just an observational comedy about a nutty professor and his fractured family comes when a man driving a truck full of toxic chemicals crashes into a train, and the accident produces a massive black chemical cloud that hovers in the distance, edging inexorably toward the town. Will it move in and poison everyone? As Jack and his family pile into their Chevy station wagon, evacuating in a miles-long traffic pile-up as portentous as the one in Godard’s “Weekend,” the film, just like that, becomes a metaphorical disaster movie about fear, conspiracy, and the toxicity of consumer products.

Those pills Babette pops turns out to be harbingers of the new world. They’re not uppers — they are, rather, mood stabilizers meant to quell her fear of death. Jack and Babette are both obsessed with death (their idea of screwball chatter is discussing which of the two of them is going to die first), and when Jack, during that toxic-cloud escape, steps out of the car for two minutes to fill the gas tank, he learns he may have gotten a lethal dose of chemicals. Or given how nuts the doctors in this film sound, is that diagnosis just another conspiracy?

These are heavy questions, and “White Noise,” on the page, achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, “White Noise” announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them. Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, “White Noise” has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news. How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of “New Body Rhumba” by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality “White Noise” could have used more of.  

Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins.

  • Production: A Netflix release of an NBGG Pictures, Heyday Films production, in association with A24. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman, Uri Singer. Executive producers: Brian Bell, Leslie Converse.
  • Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera: Lol Crawley. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Danny Elfman.
  • With: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Niviola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin, Sam Gold, Carlos Jacott, Lars Eidinger, Francis Jue, Barbara Sukowa.

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COMMENTS

  1. White Noise movie review & film summary (2022) | Roger Ebert

    Dec 30, 2022 · A daring adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel by Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. The film explores themes of death, consumerism, and trauma in three acts, with a mix of satire, drama, and disaster.

  2. White Noise (2022) - Rotten Tomatoes

    Rated: 7/10 Jul 21, 2024 Full Review Yasmine Kandil Discussing Film If anything, White Noise shows that being overtly faithful to a pre-existing source from another medium can fundamentally lead ...

  3. ‘White Noise’ Review: Toxic Events, Airborne and Domestic

    Nov 23, 2022 · White Noise” is a frequently funny movie that is also utterly in earnest. The kids do say the darnedest things, but they are also vessels of anxiety and avatars of vulnerability.

  4. White Noise - Movie Reviews - Rotten Tomatoes

    White Noise is a mumblecore indie film with a Spielbergian disaster at its core. It’s grander than anything Baumbach has done before, and may likely do again. The film is a biting satire of our ...

  5. White Noise Reviews - Metacritic

    Nov 25, 2022 · White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo.

  6. ‘White Noise’ Review: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s ...

    Dec 30, 2022 · Filmmaker Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s “unfilmable” satire tackling Hitler, Big Pharma and consumerism for Netflix, streaming Dec. 30.

  7. The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of White Noise - The Atlantic

    Dec 31, 2022 · Instead, White Noise debuted at this year’s fancy film festivals to mostly tepid reviews. It’s arriving online rather quietly, as an end-of-year oddity rather than an instant magnum opus.

  8. 'White Noise' Review: Noah Baumbach's Dystopian Domestic Comedy

    Aug 31, 2022 · White NoiseReview: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins.

  9. 'White Noise' review: Noah Baumbach's disaster comedy is ...

    Dec 30, 2022 · White Noise is now on Netflix. UPDATE: Dec. 19, 2022, 11:07 a.m. EST White Noise was reviewed out of the 60th New York Film Festival on October 12, 2022. This review has been republished, tied the ...

  10. White Noise review: Adam Driver’s Netflix movie epic arrives ...

    Dec 30, 2022 · Adapted from the beloved 1985 Don DeLillo novel, White Noise is a baffling, uneven, sporadically enthralling movie about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a dry run for the end of the ...