My preferred Noah Baumbach movies are the ones where he gets out of his own head. His best work is as cowriter of the Wes Anderson films The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox, but he doesn’t need to go that far afield. Baumbach’s collaborations with Greta Gerwig, who served as star and co-writer on Frances Ha and Mistress America, are among my favorite films that he’s directed. And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I enjoyed White Noise—a strange swing for Baumbach in terms of scope and tone, but as an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel, it’s one that takes his studied brand of New Yorker despair to amusingly unexpected places.
In fact, White Noise most resembles Fantastic Mr. Fox (itself an adaptation of a Roald Dahl’s children’s book). Whereas Mr. Fox faced a middle-age career crisis, here we meet a nearing-middle-age couple in a college town who are existentially overwhelmed by life (they run a busy, blended home of four kids), yet even more terrified of the specter of death. Baumbach vets Gerwig and Adam Driver (he most recently of Marriage Story) return to play the couple, Babette and Jack, although these aren’t the richest of characters. White Noise is ultimately an absurdist comedy, with Gerwig and Driver as the victims/clowns at its center (he wears a suit of amusing denialism, while she floats about in a tragicomic state of daze).
The movie expands beyond this family to encompass fascist ideology (Jack is a professor of Hitler studies), pharmaceutical conspiracies (Babette begins sneaking mystery pills), and a neo-noir plot twist, including a section that plays like something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Oh, there’s also the toxic cloud that emerges in the wake of a train accident and threatens to poison the town.
It’s best to give up on getting a firm handle on the film and instead enjoy the tentacles of seeming randomness (including Don Cheadle as an Elvis scholar), each of which can be traced back to one universal question: in the face of death, how do we live? Among the randomness is an end-credits sequence that offers the film’s most pleasing aesthetic element: a cast-wide dance number that takes place amidst the bright lights and vibrant shelves of a chain grocery store. You know, just like the final scene of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
(1/11/2023)
