Much (too much) has been said of artists that they have “reinvented” themselves during the pandemic. American filmmaker Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, A wedding story) was no exception. He took advantage of the first months of confinement to finish reading the novel Background noise (White Noise1985) by Don DeLillo, convinced of the need to adapt it to the cinema by the acuteness of his critical eye on our time.
The one we know for his squeaky comedies à la Woody Allen has thus reinvented himself where we did not expect him, that is to say with a disaster film, his most ambitious and delirious work to date.
Noah Baumbach first had to recognize his own taste for tasty dialogue and eccentric characters while reading DeLillo’s novel. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), its protagonist, is a portly and well-to-do university professor, a specialist in “Hitlerian studies”. He lives with Babette (Greta Gerwig), his fourth wife, who is addicted to a mysterious drug, and his four children, some from previous marriages.
Bursting with energy, the lovely family leads a peaceful life, until a train derailment causes a thick, toxic and deadly cloud over their small town in the Midwest. Everyone is evacuated and quarantined in makeshift camps. Suddenly, we move on to a new chapter. We learn that the disaster lasted only a few days and that life resumes its course. Jack and Babette will however be marked by it forever.
A dense work
While evacuating his house with his family, Jack got out of his car to refuel. Without knowing it, he ingested toxins. A little later, it is confirmed to him that he could die in about fifteen years. So even when the cloud clears, Jack remains more than ever confronted with his own mortality. It is also after the disaster that we learn that Babette is afflicted with a painful malaise, fueled by her own fear of dying, and that it is for this reason that she consumes her strange medicine.
White Noise is a very dense work, perhaps even a little too much. One adventure does not wait for the other in this story divided into three chapters. Noah Baumbach surprises, by staging car accidents, exchanges of gunfire and violent storms. Everything takes place, however, in a lightness of tone and an absurd humor typical of the director.
The characters exude a great gentleness, even a certain naivety. The colorful staging echoes their personality. Sometimes she sends us to a university campus reminiscent of the hippie fashion of the 1960s, sometimes in an aesthetic specific to the training shows of the 1980s. Greta Gerwig’s perm gives her in this way an incomparable charisma.
“Inventing Hope”
When it appeared in 1985, DeLillo’s book criticized his neo-liberal society, marked by the Cold War, nuclear threats and successive economic crises. The author observed that Western cultures were fragmenting and that, faced with the uncertainty represented by the year 2000, his fellow citizens became all the more haunted by the imminence of death, by the unknown.
In his film adaptation, Noah Baumbach very faithfully represents these initial concerns of DeLillo. We laugh a lot, for example at the caricature he makes of the university environment – symptomatic of a certain atomization of societies – where everything is becoming hyperspecialized, where the different studies may sound absurd to the average American.
White Noise is not so much a work about a disaster as about how everyone has to make up their minds, create their own stories in the face of uncertainty. Even a nun offers a cynical point of view on faith: she explains to Jack and Babette that on this earth, one must “believe things that no one takes seriously”.
The strength of the film, compared to the book, therefore becomes to demonstrate to what extent these reflexes have not changed today and to what extent we are still haunted by the same fears. Baumbach of course allows himself a few nods to the pandemic, but he remains subtle, faithful to DeLillo’s words.
Jack’s last reply, launched over the intercom of his supermarket, therefore resounds like an absurd, but adequate sentence: “We continue to invent hope and it is here that we wait together. »