I’m not really sure where to start on Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise”. I saw it back in October, but I just haven’t had the energy to write anything about it. I’m all for auteur filmmakers taking a dime out of Netflix, but “White Noise,” which is an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel, is one hot mess.
The budget on this Netflix original is said to have been over $120 million. Of course, there is no way an adaptation of DeLillo’s novel should be more than $30-50 million, not much CGI is needed , save for the toxic gas sequence, as it’s mostly characters monologuing with each other in various rooms. And yet, the budget completely ballooned for this one.
The film is 136 minutes, but it feels rushed. DeLillo’s vision is scattershot by Baumbach. Maybe a 3-hour movie, that took its time to build up DeLilo’s themes, would have done this monstrous novel more justice. That’s also maybe why the film’s first hour, which introduces the quasi-surreal setting, the neurotic characters and themes, works much better than the latter half, which feels sped-up, going from one strange moment to the next.
DeLillo’s novel has been deemed “impossible to film” ever since it was published back in 1985. It is a plotless postmodernist exploration of death, consumerism, and suburban malaise. Having to do with Jack (Adam Driver) a college professor of “Hitler studies” and his mostly-loving wife Babette Gladney (Greta Gerwig), it deals with this couple’s social anxieties, but, more specifically, their unabashed fear of death. There’s also an apocalypse-like event that shatters their suburban life.
Driver is actually very good. It’s one of his better performances. He finds the darkly comic touch needed for his character, a well-regarded college professor in Hitler studies not afraid to quote the fuhrer. Gerwig is fine, but underutilized. I much preferred Don Cheadle’s bewildered professor.
If I had to describe “White Noise” with one word it would have to be sheer and utter INDULGENCE. Baumbach takes the big fat budget Netflix gave him and splatters the screen with his incoherent vision. No true movie fan would want to miss it, I was never bored, but, I hate to say it, the film just does not work.
Having an insurance director is not uncommon in Hollywood. Aging filmmakers, in case a health issue arises, sometimes need to have one. It seems like that’s what might have occurred on “What Happens at Night.”