Directed By Noah Baumbach

Starring – Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle

The Plot – At once hilarious and horrifying, lyrical and absurd, ordinary and apocalyptic, 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.

Rated R for brief violence and adult language

White Noise | Official Teaser | Netflix – YouTube

POSITIVES

“White Noise” marks the first adaptation for Baumbach, who seamlessly lifts the thematic impulses of the film from their literary counterpart, for a wild and crazy dissection through life and spiritual heft that constantly keeps us guessing. Dealing with themes of death, academia, consumerism, and especially media influence, Baumbach calls upon his most ambitious production to date, wielding with it a stylistic set design and comfort among the typical caustic wit that match a consistency within the history of his work. It’s very much a strange film, but one that you ultimately you can’t take your eyes off of, with storytelling direction and framing devices that deconstruct themselves every twenty minutes or so, to supplant a very complex and thought-provoking experience that at the very least will remain memorable long after you’ve seen it. It also marks an all-time ambition for Noah, from the outdated products and color coordination of the supermarket set designs, to the high intense chase sequences, everything here feels like an artistically creative step forward for one of cinema’s most intimately simplistic directors, outlining the love and care that he supplants to this very respected property, while conveying the idea that there might not be a genre out there that he wouldn’t be capable of emulating. Finally, while the characters themselves are laced with problems in irresponsible designs, the work from Driver, Gerwig and Cheadle feels challenging from a chameleonized standpoint. Like their director guiding them, the trio are steered to act outside of their respective comfort zone, supplanting three against type deliveries that expand upon their talents, while offering plenty of scene stealing instances for each of them. Driver is the stand-out, however, if I had to choose one, inspiring more zealousness than typical in his blunt deliveries, all the while etching out a picture-perfect chemistry with Gerwig that effortlessly conveys the turbulence of a married couple aged to perfection.

NEGATIVES

This story has been called unadaptable by its longtime book enthusiasts, and there’s plenty of creative problems here that echo those sentiments. The first is with the script itself, with a seven-course meal of abrupt tonal shifts, overstuffed ideas, and incoherence that make it constantly a chore to follow faithfully. Coming off of the heels of “Empire of Light”, I realize I was a bit too hard by comparison, and see this as the mere definition of convoluted, leading to the kind of arduous pacing, especially during the inferior second half, that bypassed conflicted, and instead left me consistently bored throughout. To say that this film was disjointed between a three-act structure that each featured what felt like its own respective conflict is putting it lightly, so instead I will say that tonally and creatively this felt like three different films fighting for consciousness, with none of them effectively rendered to articulate the thought-provoking commentary of its literary companion. In addition to this, the characters are unlikeable from every standpoint imaginable. The dialogue, while intentional, is heavily pretentious, eviscerating any semblance of humanity from the engagement, and instead leaving each of them feeling like materializations of a screenplay. It’s so bad that the film stops casually throughout to have a philosophical discussion on everything from the pop culture influence of Adolf Hitler, to the meaning behind one character’s bowel movements, feeling like heavily padded and meaningless exposition that unnecessarily pushes the run time to 135 minutes, all the while muddling the merit of the aforementioned thematic impulses in a cloud of clutter that quite literally obscures the cloud of toxic waste that was only the primary conflict in marketing. On top of this, the irritating personalities in each of them make it difficult to invest or even care about their well-being. This leaves the many spontaneous conflicts resonating with a complete lack of effectiveness, underselling the urgency or vulnerability of the stakes held in tow, and in turn leaving the frustrating moments of ridiculousness only further hyping the air of disappointment in an inescapably inconsequential enveloping. Last but not least, while it is great to hear Danny Elfman once again command the chords of a movie’s musical score, the work here is easily some of his least inspiring in the last decade of his career. To be fair, the tracks themselves are atmospherically rich and full depth and spontaneity inside of their instrumentals, but they simply don’t convey reflection in the scenes and sequences they audibly decorate, leaving us with audible accompaniment that abandons us at the alter with one of the very best in the business even unable to rise to the occasion.

OVERALL
Noah Baumbach’s latest Oscar darling simply isn’t for me. It’s a creatively bloated, tonally disfigured adaptation of a novel deemed unadaptable, with the proof in the pudding coming from the many tedious exercises in pretentious talking points and unappealing characters that alienate its ambition. While the film occasionally echoes a note of triumph in the scale of its cinematic ambition, the aimless and inconsequential execution constantly deviates the expectations, proving that the static of its sentiments was purely just white noise.

My Grade: 4/10 or D