Home Movie Reviews White Noise Review: Noah Baumbach’s Latest Is Messy, Tedious Drama [Middleburg]

Bogged down by uneven plotting & genre changes, White Noise loses itself in the chaos of what it’s trying to say and fails to become fully realized.

Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, and Sam Nivola in White Noise
 

Writer-director Noah Baumbach is back with White Noise, an adaptation of the 1985 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo. Starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, the film is a satire that has lofty goals but which never soars above its half-formed ideas and messy execution. Bogged down by uneven plotting and genre changes, White Noise loses itself in the chaos of what it’s trying to say and fails to become fully realized or coherent.
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Jack Gladney (Driver) and Babette (Gerwig) live in a college town where they raise their four children that they have together and through marriage — this both being their fourth. Jack is a professor of Hitler studies and is dreading his upcoming conference. When daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) discovers Babette has been taking a mysterious drug, she urges Jack to do something about it, but the truth might not be what he is ready to hear. Meanwhile, a truck collides with a train on the outskirts of town, resulting in an airborne toxic event that exposes the community to chemical waste, leading everyone to evacuate before it’s too late.

Related: Adam Driver & Greta Gerwig Face A Toxic Event in White Noise Trailer

Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, and Sam Nivola in White Noise
 

White Noise is inconsistent and tonally uneven, with characters that seem more like caricatures than fully drawn people. It’s hard to make sense of this messy, unnecessarily convoluted film where the credits sequence is the best part — and what the rest of the film should have emulated more. There is little to no feeling involved, and there is a disconnect felt between the audience and the story. This detachment is most obvious in the second half of the film, which is wildly different from the first half. It feels more like one is watching two very disparate stories — they both have a lot of potential, but they are endlessly frustrating and tedious to sit through. Driver and Gerwig are solid, and they seem to be having a fun time onscreen, but the material just isn’t there for them. Don Cheadle, who portrays Jack’s colleague Murray Siskind, gets very little to work with, but he’s still good despite a limited role.

Often, White Noise is aimless. Yes, the themes of the film are not exactly subtle, especially in the first half, where everyone is constantly and loudly distracted by what is happening around them to focus on what really matters. The film and the book it’s based on amplifies the obsessions, consumptions, and fear that plague humanity, but the film’s satire doesn’t deliver much depth or humor when examining its subject matter. Everything just sort of happens and its complexities are lost in the cacophony of the film’s own noise and chaos, the latter of which only works in the immediate aftermath of the truck’s collision with the train.

Don Cheadle and Adam Driver in White Noise

It’s a shame, too, because Baumbach’s film can be occasionally exciting and happily weird. Its focus on the dishonesty that festers in relationships and how people continue to distract themselves, even when faced with the possibility of the world’s deterioration, is compelling, to be sure. But the points the film is trying to make have been explored in other films, and to greater effect. A movie can only go so far in its themes if it’s unwilling to fully explore them beyond the surface. To that end, White Noise seems like it has a lot to say, including a throughline about existential dread, but it’s all lost amidst superficiality and its own distractions, which weaken the film’s overarching themes. In that way, it becomes what it is trying to analyze, and a shadow of what it could have been.

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White Noise had its 2022 Middleburg Film Festival premiere in October. The film releases in limited theaters on November 25 and will be available to stream on Netflix December 30. It is 136 minutes long and is not yet rated.