White Noise paints a portrait of a modern American family. As parents and children struggle to manage everyday conflicts, they also explore the universal mysteries of love and death. And wonder how to be happy in an unstable world.
Just before the pandemic, Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, Marriage Story) re-read a book that marked his adolescence. What the filmmaker found in White Noise (Background noise in French), the novel that Don DeLillo published in 1985, was so in tune with our times that he couldn’t resist bringing it to the screen. The project was ambitious, but the result, alas, is half fig, half grape.
While he had dragged us into the harsh reality of a relationship that is dying out with cruel accents of truth in the excellent Marriage Storythe filmmaker this time takes another avenue by painting the portrait of a family whose life will be constantly disturbed by strange phenomena.
Adam Driver, always excellent, this time slips into the skin of Jack, an academic specializing in the history of Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Facing him, or rather, in parallel, a colleague (Don Cheadle) fascinated by the life of Elvis Presley. At home, Jack’s wife (Greta Gerwig) treats her life-sickness with a drug no one knows about, and the turmoil erupts the day a truck accident causes such a toxic cloud in the area. That whole town in Ohio needs to be evacuated urgently. With the chaos that entails.
It is true that the themes addressed by Don DeLillo in his novel, set in the America of a few decades ago, are still as relevant as ever. But after a more “realistic” first part, the story then falls almost into the fantastic, without really finding any coherence there. Of course, the quality of the dialogues remains intact, and the black humor effects are rather successful, but the whole, on arrival, does not arouse much enthusiasm.
Opening film of the Venice Film Festival, during which a first version of this text was published, White Noise is showing in Montreal at the Cinéma Moderne and the Cinémathèque québécoise in its original version with French subtitles. It will be available on Netflix from December 30.
Indoors
Drama
White Noise
Noah Baumbach
With Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle
2:16 a.m.