White Noise Review: Adam Driver’s Netflix epic movie comes just in time

If books are written about Netflix’s big investment in prestige cinema, Noah Baumbach’s White noise could go down as the movie that finally killed the goose that laid the golden budgets. That’s not to say the streaming service will never again fund an auteur filmmaker’s vanity project — it still hasn’t snagged the Best Picture Oscar, and, spoilers, this film won’t be the one that wins it — but it will is unlikely he will do it again on this scale. The Irishman was more expensive Blond was more of a disaster, but for sheer hubris you can’t top a rumored $140 million apocalyptic adaptation of a rumored unfilmable classic by a director better known for sizzling domestic comedy. We certainly won’t see anything like it again – at least not from Netflix.

You might as well go out with a bang. Adapted from the popular 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, White noise is a confusing, uneven, sporadically compelling film about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a rehearsal for the end of the world. It’s basically three films in one: a mannered satire on science, consumerism and the modern family, followed by a paranoid, Spielberg-esque disaster epic. The final third spirals into a queasy, surreal noir reminiscent of the most inscrutable Coen brothers. If you had to guess which of these Baumbach uses most successfully based on his previous work, you would almost certainly be wrong.

Baumbach’s love of the source novel is obvious. This is a faithful, if surprisingly light-hearted and quirky, adaptation. It lacks only a handful of the novel’s beats, while the screenplay, which Baumbach wrote himself, reverently uplifts large parts of DeLillo’s dialogue and prose. But fan testimonials notwithstanding, the director oddly fits into the book. Baumbach specializes in interpersonal dramas, such as Franz Ha or history of marriage, written, performed and shot in a naturalistic style. However, DeLillo’s book is archaic, stylized, and metaphorical, full of big ideas, big events, and solipsistic characters talking at random.

The story revolves around Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor at a pleasantly anonymous heartland university who pioneered the provocative field of “Hitler Studies.” At work, Jack covers up his lack of actual erudition (he doesn’t know German) and engages in a spiraling intellectual discourse with his friend Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), who is contemplating switching from car crashes to Elvis Presley. At home, Jack and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) happily run a busy, quarrelsome blended family. The love-struck couple vie to see which of them is more afraid of dying, but something really seems wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is looming on the horizon – literally. An accident unleashes a toxic cloud known as the Airborne Toxic Event, and a wave of panic sweeps the Gladneys.

Everything about this material, apart from his bourgeois intellectual milieu, pushes Baumbach far out of his comfort zone. (It’s also the first historical play he’s attempted, and the heightened, day-bright take on the 1980s in costume and production design is one of them White noise‘s main pleasure.) He rises to the challenge in unexpected ways. This is by far his most visually dense and imaginative film, and he deftly constructs a series of stunning set pieces: an opening lecture by Don Cheadle’s character Murray punctuated by archival footage of car crashes; an academic duel between Jack and Murray, who sneak around a lecture hall and lecture while weaving together the legends of Hitler and Elvis; Jack’s really scary night terrors; and a theatrical confrontation between Jack and Babette late in the film when he gets her to finally open up and admit what’s wrong. The latter is exquisitely blocked and beautifully performed, especially by a tortured Gerwig.

Although the flashy CGI train wreck that sets off the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t actually work – it literally takes literally a catastrophe that’s all the more ominous in the book for being distant and vague – what follows is an extraordinary, sustained sequence reminiscent of Spielberg’s masterpiece of collective madness, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It turns out that as a big-scale thriller director, Baumbach has what it takes. The scenes of gridlock and carnage under the boiling sky have a terrifying charge, while a stop at an abandoned gas station has something of Hitchcock’s naked terror The birds. Baumbach later shows he can mix action with comedy in an absurd station wagon car chase that could easily have been pulled out of a Chevy Chase movie from the time he was in White noise is set. At times, Baumbach seems more instinctively connected to the pop culture that DeLillo criticized than to DeLillo himself.

Strangely for Baumbach, who is usually very generous with his actors, the cast fails, adrift in the director’s surreal grandiosity of design and struggling to find rhythm in his collage of lines from the book. Cheadle, tweedy and questioning, fares best in this odd world, delivering statements like “She’s got important hair.” Driver has some great moments and characterful deals – see him slip his hand through his academic robes to toned Jack’s Pushing glasses up his gorgeous nose with a private grin – but he’s sadly miscast. At 39, he’s at least a decade too young for Jack, and even the patina and shabby middle-aged patina that the makeup and costume department bestowed on him can’t hide his manhood. You just can’t buy Driver as a foiled academic; his body does not know what defeated means. He’s very funny though. The driver’s intensity often causes his comedic abilities to be overlooked, so it’s a joy to find such an unlikely film as White noise brings them to the fore.

Perhaps what irks DeLillo purists most about Baumbach’s film is what makes it most enjoyable for everyone else to watch: It’s fun. It’s a chaotic film that doesn’t quite find the thread to make sense of DeLillo’s vision or the reality of its characters — especially during its bewildering final third, after the Airborne Toxic Event unravels and Jack becomes obsessed with Babette’s place in some sort of pharmaceutical conspiracy . But it was done with wit and an infectious taste. Baumbach lunges for laughs and scares, often successfully, spattering the screen with bright colors and movement. Under the credits, he stages a dance number in the aisles of the supermarket, which DeLillo and his pretentious characters imagine as a modern American church. Does Baumbach still make a point or is he just cutting? The latter, I suspect, and more power for him. He took the money from Netflix and ran away.

White noise is now available on Netflix.