Movie Review : White Noise (2022)
American author Don DeLillo is the definition of an acquired taste. His novels are conceptual, complex, lyrical in their own modern way and often sardonic although it’s not always clear when or why. He's very much a literary pleasure and not necessarily a candidate for adaptation. That didn't deter mumblecore legend Noah Baumbach from adapting DeLillo's oddly à propos 1985 novel White Noise in 2002 and it went… low key great? Although DeLillo is technically impossible to adapt?
For the uninitiated, White Noise is the story of Jack Gladney (played masterfully by Adam Driver), a college professor and the world's foremost expert in Hitler Studies. He lives an innocent enough life along with his fourth wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their four children from previous marriages, until an airborne toxic event throws the precarious balance of their existences out of wack. Babette's health starts spiraling down, which leads Jack to discover his wife's terrible secret.
But how can you possibly adapt a Don DeLillo novel?
I can't possible imagine anyone who isn't an avid Don DeLillo fan wanting to actually watch this movie, so I'm going to evaluate White Noise using two criteria : a) how faithful it remains to the novel and b) how well it communicates its themes. Noah Baumbach's White Noise is extremely faithful to Don DeLillo's novel. Sometimes a little too much. Several dialogue lines are taken directly from the novel, which would be laudable if it didn't sound so robotic and pretentious.
It's nobody's fault here, except perhaps Baumbach's for refusing to trim White Noise's language into a more democratic vernacular. Anyone unfamiliar with White Noise or Don DeLillo must think this sounds fucking insane or pretentious. Characters are reading their lines like stage actors doing Shakespearean monologues. Everyone sounds slightly autistic. This aesthetic choice deters from the neurotic precision of Don DeLillo's ideas and observations, which are the reason why he's so popular.
Otherwise, the eighties imagined and crafted by Noah Baumbach are nothing short of spectacular. It's not much the eighties as they were or the eighties as we remember them today (that idiotic neon-lit nostalgic memory), but rather the idea of the eighties. It was such a defeated decade where everyone stopped being idealistic and quietly suffered in well-organized, well-designed lives they were convinced to have chosen for themselves. That idea really shines through Baumbach's painstakingly conceived sets.
The grocery store is an important location in the novel and in the movie. It's where townsfolk mingle and Jack's friend Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) comes to fantasize about Babette (which is unfortunately downplayed here) and formulate his weird ideas about existence in general. It's overlit, the angles are sharp, colour comes in and out, like the place was deliberately trying to emphasize Murray's ideas. Don DeLillo's novels are extremely detail-oriented and so is this movie.
Baumbach's eighties are colourful, but not too much. Zany, but not thoughtless. They’re definitely not a nostalgic good time.
Death, taxes, meaninglessness and everything else
Noah Baumbach does a great job at translating the themes of Don DeLillo's novel in his movie, mostly because they’re straightforward despite the intellectual density of he work : only death is real and inevitable. If you don't acknowledge this fact, you're merely distracting your mind from it. One person should choose his course of action on a daily basis in order to be remembered for reasons they want or their fear of the inevitable will only grow. It's a book about the nature of the tedium of life.
That's why Jack chose Hitler Studies: it's a field he invented, so he's going to be remembered for pioneering it and Hitler is a topic that beat death. He is, in a perverse way, a source of comfort to Jack. The grocery store is another important symbol. It's a pretty intense critic of consumerism, but I don't think it’s Marxist in any meaningful way. Purchasing is a ritual. People meet at the Grocery store like they would in church. They find comfort in acquiring tangible goods to ward off their anxiety.
What makes White Noise such a powerful story is Don DeLillo's blissful, almost surrender to mortality and insignificance. It's a pushback against the growing culture of the eighties (that very much shaped how we perceive the world today) that each of us are special and each of us are the centre of the universe. That everyone will notice once you do what you're told. That plea for intellectual courage is not as powerful in the film adaptation (irony and sincerity are too far apart), but it’s there.
*
White Noise is polished, but imperfect. It has soul albeit it is standing in the towering shadow of its creator. A meticulous cinematography, Noah Baumbach's obsessive attention to detail and killer performances from Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Sam Nivola make it a film that can be appreciated by anybody. It will take patience and focus from people who aren't familiar with Don DeLillo, but it’ll work. You will see yourself in its heartbrokenness and it will scare you. At least it should.
