Noah Baumbach (2022)
Don DeLillo’s 1985 post-modern novel White Noise is reputedly ‘unfilmable’. Those of us who’ve not read it can’t know if Noah Baumbach’s screen version, showing at the London Film Festival, defies the book’s reputation – we can only decide if the result is a coherent piece of cinema, and it is. But White Noise is also, alas, Baumbach’s least successful film since Margot at the Wedding (2007).
In the opening sequence, an academic called Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) gives a lecture extolling the virtues of the car crash in American movies. He tells his students – at the College-on-the-Hill, in a small town somewhere in the Midwest – that, whatever carnage may be involved, there’s something invigorating about Hollywood’s enduring appetite for upping the ante on the design and spectacular staging of automotive collision. There’s a connection of sorts between Murray’s view and White Noise‘s central concern with the death-defying. The lead characters are Murray’s College-on-the-Hill colleague Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), Professor of Hitler Studies, and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig). They’re both on their fourth marriage; the blended family runs to four children – Denise (Raffey Cassidy), Heinrich (Sam Nivola), Steffi (May Nivola) and Wilder (Dean Moore/Henry Moore), the youngest and the only child Jack and Babette have had together. The household runs on a fuel of incessant, rapid-fire chatter, the precocious kids competing with their (step)father in the smart-aleck stakes, but it’s immediately clear these materially comfortable lives are lived on a neurotic precipice. In bed Jack and Babette anxiously discuss which one of them had better die first. Babette and Denise pronounce on the best medication for this or that; Denise asks Jack if he knows about the tablets that Babette is taking surreptitiously. (He doesn’t.) The kids are addicted to TV news coverage of disasters, natural or manmade.
The family are soon themselves on the receiving end of catastrophe when, not too far from their home, a lorry crashes into a train transporting chemical waste. A huge toxic cloud forces a mass exodus from the area. Despite Jack’s increasingly hollow assurances that there’s nothing to worry about, he, Babette and the children have no option but to join their neighbours in a miles-long traffic jam, en route to an evacuation camp. The protagonists’ morbid concerns aren’t the only feature of White Noise foreshadowed by that paean to car crashes. The movie clips Murray Siskind uses to illustrate his lecture are a hint that Noah Baumbach will be stepping outside his comfort zone – his proven talent is for developing character through dialogue, typically in domestic settings – into set-piece action film-making. Baumbach does a perfectly good job of staging the accident that causes the cataclysmic ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ and the sequences showing the Gladneys, and thousands of others, on the road. When another motorist tries to queue-jump, there’s a sudden, unexpected car crash. It’s hard to feel Murray’s relish for the ensuing wreckage but there’s no denying that Baumbach makes the moment startling.
The panic flight from the toxic cloud is White Noise’s main event but proves to be a fuss about oddly little. A few minutes out of the car at an unmanned petrol station are long enough for Jack to be exposed to airborne toxins; doctors tell him the consequences will be fatal though it may be decades before the poisons in his system finally do their work. Once the film moves on in time, with the Gladneys back at home, the impact of the chemical spillage seems otherwise to have been negligible – and this doesn’t come across as Baumbach lampooning people who are wilfully oblivious to the dark side of life. At the same time, the implication that lethal contamination forces Jack to confront the fact that he’s going to die feels surplus to dramatic requirements: he and Babette were already preoccupied with their mortality.
You get the same feeling when the narrative focus switches to Babette’s medication and the story behind it. She’s taking an experimental drug called Dylar, designed to alleviate the fear of death. Her supplier is a weirdo called Arlo Shell (Lars Eidinger), who lives in a motel room where Babette has sex with him in exchange for the tablets. This strand may be meant to poke fun at contemporary society’s obsession with pharmacological cures for psychological ill health – it certainly picks up on all the talk in the Gladneys’ home about medical treatments. But the idea of a pill to suppress fear of death (a pill that doesn’t work, for Babette anyway) seems a tautology in a scenario premised from the start on a theme of human beings ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. (That quotation, from a poem written in the mid-1930s, confirms the concept as far from new.) One of the most effective moments in the toxic cloud hegira comes when the Gladneys notice a freeway-side department store still full of shoppers. There’s a sale on, after all.
Baumbach apparently retains Don DeLillo’s setting of the mid-1980s, a time when the US economy was riding high and climate change anxieties had yet to gather momentum. The existential angst of DeLillo’s characters, despite their and America’s sitting pretty, may have meant more in 1985 than it can now – in light of disasters ranging from 9/11 to Covid and with the prospect of worse to come. More damaging to the film is that the chattering-classes satire – in evidence at the Gladneys’ dinner table and especially in the College-on-the-Hill senior common room – imparts a sustained air of whimsy to proceedings that dilutes White Noise‘s menace and urgency. Murray Siskind, fascinated by the iconography of American popular culture, wants to do for Elvis Presley what Jack has supposedly done for Hitler as an established academic subject. (I wasn’t convinced that, even forty years ago, Jack was the academic pioneer he’s meant to be but let that pass.) There’s a funny sequence in which Murray invites Jack to sit in on one of his lectures and it turns into a vigorous verbal competition between them, expatiating on the King vs the Führer. Murray also likes to compare supermarket shopping with the Buddhist concept of bardo (the state of existence between two lives): the closing credits of White Noise accompany a zany stop-go dance routine by Murray and the Gladneys along supermarket aisles. But these elements, like the historical setting, undermine the film’s power as an apocalyptic black comedy.
For much of the film, Adam Driver looks to have a cushion stuffed under his shirt. When Jack takes off the shirt for a medical examination, the paunch is revealed as either real or high-class prosthetics. Whichever it is seems a waste of effort as a means of underlining how middle-aged Jack is but perhaps Driver felt more secure with the extra weight. His playing here is typically resourceful but unusually uneasy. He delivers, very ably, a series of turns – upstaging Murray’s lecture, struggling with the rudiments of spoken German (it turns out Jack, despite his academic cachet, has never learned the language but suddenly needs to, for a conference he’s hosting …) Driver’s much less comfortable, though, with the abundant dialogue than he was in Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) – perhaps because he intuits Jack isn’t much of a character. Greta Gerwig, with her seemingly artless emotionality, comes off better than Driver. Don Cheadle, a surprising choice for the role, does well as eccentric, fanciful Murray. Lars Eidinger can be relied on to overact and duly does so: the scenes involving Arlo Shell are so garish anyway this doesn’t matter as much as it might. Among the Gladney kids, Sam and May Nivola are both notably fluent performers. (Their father Alessandro is also in the cast, according to Wikipedia, though not according to IMDb – and I didn’t manage to spot him.)
There’s no doubt White Noise is well named even though neither the characters’ non-stop talk nor the enduring soundtrack of broadcast media and muzak in the world they inhabit drowns out the insistent voice inside the heads of Jack and Babette that tells them they’re going to die. At one point they wonder if ‘death is just sound – white noise’, whatever that may mean. All in all, Noah Baumbach’s film, like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2009), serves as a protracted reminder that witty screen talk about mortality was a lot more fun in Woody Allen’s heyday.
7 October 2022
