Film review: White Noise is an exhausting feast

I really enjoyed the opening minutes of White Noise, in which Don Cheadle’s character, a university professor, gives a lecture on car crashes in Hollywood movies. He argues that they are ultimately optimistic, even jaunty events in cinema, always striving to reach new heights of inventiveness. I wish that talk had gone on longer.

I also quite enjoyed the closing minutes of the film, featuring the newly released pop song New Body Rhumba from LCD Soundsystem playing over the credits, while cast members dance in the aisles of an ’80s-era A&P supermarket.

Alas, this still leaves more than two hours of middling middle, which is where you’ll spend most of your time in this, a rare Noah Baumbach misfire, adapted from a supposedly unfilmmable 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. Or perhaps this just proves that it is actually unfilmmable, at or least un-successfully-filmmable.

Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, famed professor of Hitler studies somewhere in the wilds of Ohio academia. He and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) represent each other’s fourth marriage, and they have several children from previous unions, as well as one from their own. The film’s opening chapter, Waves and Radiation, establishes the time period and introduces a mystery drug called Dylar, which Babette has been taking on the sly, and which seems to be causing memory lapses.

It also sets up what may be the film’s biggest flaw, which is the unnatural, overly mannered delivery of the archly written dialogue. It feels as though we’re watching a play or even a table read that’s been filmed, and yet Baumbach is such a meticulous director that this effect must be intentional. White Noise might be the first film where I’d be happy to see an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay, but unwilling to allow it any other kudos.

Jack is wafting along in his personal and professional life with only minor impediments. He is secretly taking German lessons, embarrassed at being a celebrated Third-Reich scholar who doesn’t know the language. And he has a weird dream that his wife has been replaced with a man, perhaps even a doppelganger of himself.

Both he and Babette are also grappling with a persistent anxiety over their eventual deaths, at one point discussing who will go first and how the other will feel about it. It’s all quite academic, at least until the film’s second chapter, The Airborne Toxic Event, named after the dangerous chemical cloud that rises over the town when a tanker truck collides with a freight train.

Jack is determined to wait out the situation from the supposed safety and relative comfort of their house, until an order to evacuate sets them on the road, and a subsequent order to stay indoors finds them too far from home to double back. At which point the fear of death switches from a theoretical concern to an imminent one, especially after Jack gets a potential dose of the chemical while fueling their car.

Films that grapple with mortality are nothing new, and range from the obvious suspects – The Sweet Hereafter, After Life, The Fault In Our Stars – to stories that touch on the topic only tangentially. (I’ve always been Moonstruck by that line in the Norman Jewison film, delivered by Olympia Dukakis: “Why do men chase women? I think it’s because they fear death.”)

Alejandro G. Inarritu, in addition to his so-called death trilogy – Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel – has long had a fascination with what he calls “the only factual truth, that last immigration that we will all have to go through.” Death stalks his movies. Filmmaker Michel Gondry once told me he can’t watch an old film without fixating on how many of its cast are now dead. And it is perhaps a little sophomoric, but also strange, to consider that the moment your image is recorded on film, you move away from it and toward death, while it stays frozen in time, forever ageless.

1. Chris Knight interviews Alejandro G. Inarritu

2. Read Chris Knight's review of She Said

Unfortunately, Baumbach seems to want to both nudge and bludgeon (nudgeon?) us with his film’s mortal messaging. On the one hand we have the Gladney children, preoccupied with carcinogenic food additives and manifestations of medical distress. On the other, the older generation, willfully blind to the same factors. Jack has a conversation with his doctor in which he refuses to admit he’s been in contact with the toxic cloud, thus forcing the MD into the circular conclusion that he has no symptoms of being in contact with the toxic cloud.

And everyone in the family enjoys gathering ’round the television to watch news footage of plane crashes. There’s also a great line, apparently taken from the book, that “family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.” Misinformation about both death and life, I suppose.

White Noise is busy to the point of being exhausting, and yet it’s also full of food for thought. Little wonder that reviews since its debut at the Venice film festival have been so divisive. I wish I could pick and choose from its buffet rather than agree to consume the whole meal. Perhaps there’s an edit to be made, shorter than the film’s 136 minutes, and more digestible for it.

White Noise opens Dec. 2 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver; Dec. 9 in Ottawa and Kingston; and Dec. 30 on Netflix.

2 stars out of 5

Get the latest from Chris Knight straight to your inbox