‘White Noise’ Venice Film Festival Review: Noah Baumbach Sends Out A Signal Of Sincerity Amidst A Cloud Of Atmospheric Dread

In his third film made for streaming giant Netflix, filmmaker Noah Baumbach expands to his grandest canvas to date with White Noise. The latitude is fitting for an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s postmodern 1985 novel, given that many regarded the text as unfilmable. The challenging nature of the transposition alone may garner Baumbach some laurels from the Academy Awards as the 2023 Oscars contenders start to reveal themselves. He captures the plot and atmospheric dread of DeLillo’s book, yes. But the animating spirit of the film takes as much spiritual inspiration from Ernest Becker’s seminal text The Denial of Death, an anthropology of how people postulate the meaning of life by triangulating their relationship to its inevitable end.

Baumbach largely sidesteps translating the meat of DeLillo’s thick, verbose prose to screen. He captures its thematic density, if not quite its full contour. Instead, he latches on instead to what will become instantly familiar to fans of his domestic dramedies: overly cerebral academics thrown into crisis by events spiraling out of their control. After a large chemical explosion jolts a docile consumerist college town in the ‘80s, the comfortable Gladney family has plenty of cause to be unsettled. Their dawning realization that their affluence cannot stave off the end that meets us all leads to the failure of many bulwarks against fatalism. And when those fall, unconventional remedies emerge.

No one feels the pinch quite like Adam Driver’s Jack Gladney, a pioneering professor of Hitler Studies who’s built a cult of celebrity around his own interrogation of the Fuhrer’s iconography. No one has shown a keener understanding of how to use and subvert Driver’s screen presence quite like Baumbach. There’s something borderline mythological to his imposing stature that both White Noise and Marriage Story alike convey. But that also cedes easily to ridiculousness, both in the pettiness of his dialogue or the paunchiness of Jack’s beer gut. Through Driver’s interpretation, the character becomes the very embodiment of the film’s tragicomic ethos. It might not be as showy as the performances that garnered him Oscar nominations, but it’s no less impressive.

Jack is the key purveyor of that glowering Baumbachian irony in standing above these characters who lament the existential vacuity of the people around them … yet remain blithely unaware of how they, too, are ensnared in the same capitalist trap. Baumbach always finds the droll and dry humor lurking within the banter between Jack and Greta Gerwig’s Babette, his exercise-instructing wife trying to dull the pain of her ennui with mysterious pharmaceuticals. Gerwig does not miss a beat her first on-screen role since 2016, continuing her streak of capturing the many nuances of quirky, complex, and compassionate women.

Whether it’s as silly as the arrival of new students to College on the Hill or as ominous as the Airborne Toxic Event looming over their town as a mushroom cloud, Baumbach’s comedy of manners is never far removed from an outright chaotic Buñuelian satire. White Noise foregrounds the humor of the text that can often be tough to tease out on the page. Yet while the rapid-fire content of their aloof conversations keeps White Noise at an engaging clip, it’s the context that slowly becomes the film’s main attraction.

As the film moves into increasingly esoteric and surreal directions in the third act, it’s crucial that Baumbach establishes the web of conformity and commodity in which the characters navigate. (The budget to help fully realize this world in both scale and specificity certainly does not hurt.) It’s not that Baumbach has never properly reconstructed a milieu in his previous films, but his characters usually possess such agency and independence (or deceive themselves so thoroughly into this illusion) that they overpower their environments.

But here, the steady drumbeat of the titular phenomenon becomes audible. Not so much in the sound design, though the squeaks and creaks add to a growing discomfort in the film. The true static of everyday life comes courtesy of the famous icons and fancy items that contribute to dulling the senses and delaying any reckoning with reality. It’s undetectable until it’s unmistakable – and then altogether suffocating to a sense of vitality or vivacity.

Baumbach exhibits remarkable restraint in not overloading the political or aesthetic parallels in White Noise. Though the surprise arrival of the Airborne Toxic Event and the fumbling bureaucratic response is resonant in a COVID-weary world, the film’s relevance does not feel so explicitly tied to the pandemic that it will quickly become stale. He’s also not heavy-handed with the revisionist fury against the erroneous utopia of the Reaganite era. (In fact, the only reference to the actor-turned-president comes in a throwaway factoid uttered by a character off-screen claiming Reagan was once cast in Casablanca.) The signifiers may be period-bound, but Baumbach never lets the details get in the way of obliquely identifying an underlying spiritual sickness. Deafness to death by white noise afflicts and affects any culture that tries to will away the finality of life through distraction and delusion.

The film is further confirmation that unlike many a Noah Baumbach film from his younger years, sniveling at clueless intellectuals is now his floor – not his ceiling. To watch the last decade of Baumbach movies (which coincide with his on- and off-screen partnership with Greta Gerwig) is to watch an artist slowly yet profoundly hone his sense of earnestness. It’s both brutally incongruous and entirely fitting that this newfound sensibility reaches full bloom in the abstruse White Noise.

These competing instincts forced to coexist in the fabric of the film echo the tensions of DeLillo’s original text – while also challenging them altogether. This knotty film full of contradictions may initially strike as messy, but Baumbach’s sturdy direction and fearless writing will captivate anyone game for the challenge of keeping up.

Baumbach’s signal of sincerity cuts through DeLillo’s postmodern sea of White Noise. The world within the story is untrustworthy, as are its institutions and ideologies. But when all else fails, the film suggests the possibility of faith in one another. Somewhere buried in the aisles of a consumerist hellscape sits that uncommon good of hope. It’s alternately priceless and worthless in the film’s estimation, yet a resource that manages to renew itself in even the bleakest of conditions may be all we have.

White Noise world premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Netflix will release it on December 30.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.