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Death unites us all. And societies are shaped by not just the dread of that inevitable outcome but the common manners in which we push those existential thoughts aside. Consumerism, conspiracy theories, and collective trauma collide in Noah Baumbach's daring adaptation of a novel that may have been published in the mid-'80s but undeniably speaks to the issues that continue to dominate our culture in the 2020s. A story of a family unmoored from their already fragile existence by an airborne toxic event has relevance to the COVID era that author Don DeLillo couldn't have imagined specifically. Yet, the source material here is designed to speak to a larger sense of trauma and fear—elements that will never go away as long as that pesky Grim Reaper remains in our lives. Baumbach's adaptation of "White Noise" unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches. Life is full of surprises, right?

"White Noise" opens with a professor named Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) speaking of the comfort of car crashes on film. Like every choice in this script, it's not an accident. Siskind speaks of the simplicity of the car crash, noting how it cuts through character and plotting to something that's easily understood and relatable. It foreshadows the mid-section of a film that will play essentially like a disaster movie, asking viewers to imagine what they would do if stuck in the same situation. And it's a set-up for another fascinating aspect of "White Noise"—a commentary on crowd catharsis. We are at peace when we see others doing the same thing we are doing, whether it's watching a car crash in a movie, attending an Elvis concert, or buying things we don't need at an A&P grocery store.

Someone who keenly understands groupthink is Professor Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), one of the world experts on Hitler Studies, even though he's embarrassed that he doesn't speak German. The first act—and the film is divided into three parts on-screen—could be called a satire of academia as Gladney, Siskind, and their colleague use big words to help get a grip on big problems. Jack and his wife Babbette ( Greta Gerwig ) have a blended family that includes the anxiety-prone Denise ( Raffey Cassidy ), problem-solving Heinrich ( Sam Nivola ), and two more children. Babbette has forgotten things lately, and Denise notices a new prescription bottle for a drug called Dylar. This is an everyday American family—going through the motions of life as they try to push away the issues that have dogged philosophers for eons, like the meaning of it all and how to stop thinking about when it ends. In one of the best early scenes, a comment about how happy they are leads Babbette and Jack into a conversation about who should die first. 

While death is a concern in the first act of "White Noise," it becomes more tactile in the second act, titled "The Airborne Toxic Event." A train crash at the edge of town sends chemicals flying into the sky, and everyone in the Gladney family except Jack panics. As he tries to defuse the situation, Denise becomes convinced that she's sick already, and Henrich obsessively listens to news reports. Before long, they're on the road in a mass evacuation, and one of Baumbach's most impressive technical achievements unfolds, capturing a family on the run from the unknown.

Without spoiling the final act completely, it re-centers the Gladneys back at home, but with death a much more present reality in Jack's mind. Unfortunately, as the intensity rises, "White Noise" loses some of its impact, especially in a few talky scenes near the end that betray the tone of the first half. Yes, the film always deals with "serious" subjects, but it gets rocky when they take center stage, and the tone struggles to merge satire and marital drama. DeLillo's book was notoriously called "unfilmable" for decades, and it feels like this last act is where that's most apparent.

Thankfully, Baumbach has two of his most reliable collaborators to keep it from going off the rails. Driver is, once again, excellent here, crafting a performance that is often very funny without relying on broad character beats. There's a version of this character that's pitched to eleven—the awkward academic forced into trying to keep his family alive despite his inferior skill set—but Driver gives a performance that's often very subtle even as everything around him is going broad. Gerwig is a little oddly mannered early in the film, but that makes sense for a character who becomes somewhat unmoored before the air around her becomes toxic.

To unpack this epic of existential dread, Baumbach has assembled a team that deserves mention. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (" Vox Lux ") finds the right balance between realism and parody in his camera work, giving much of the film an exaggerated look amplified by Jess Gonchor's ace production design. The A&P here, with its bright colors and shelves of identical items, is not quite reality, but it's close enough to make its point, and the chaotic sequences of panic in the mid-section have the energy of a CGI blockbuster. Finally, Danny Elfman's score is one of the best of the year, connecting the three tonally different sections.

What does it all mean? Why do we take pills, buy junk, and watch car crashes to escape our fears? The phenomenal A&P dance sequence that ends "White Noise" lands a key theme in a fascinating way—we may all just be buying colorful stuff we don't need to distract ourselves from reality, but let's at least try to have fun while we're doing it.

In limited theatrical release now. On Netflix on December 30 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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White Noise (2022)

Rated R for brief violence and language.

135 minutes

Adam Driver as Jack Gladney

Greta Gerwig as Babbette

Raffey Cassidy as Denise

Sam Nivola as Heinrich

May Nivola as Steffie

Don Cheadle as Murray Siskind

Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards

André 3000 as Elliot Lasher

Lars Eidinger as Arlo Shell

• Noah Baumbach

Writer (based on the book by)

• Don DeLillo

Cinematographer

• Lol Crawley
• Matthew Hannam
• Danny Elfman

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Noah Baumbach's 'White Noise' adaptation is brave, even if not entirely successful

John Powers

Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy appear in Noah Baumbach's White Noise. Wilson Webb/Netflix hide caption

Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy appear in Noah Baumbach's White Noise.

These are frustrating days for ambitious American filmmakers. Critics and older filmgoers bemoan that our screens offer little more than blockbuster franchises and cheap horror pictures. Yet when directors try to make something different and daring, they usually get thumped if they don't completely succeed.

Take the new Netflix film White Noise , the latest film from Noah Baumbach, best known for movies like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story . The movie is adapted from Don DeLillo 's 1985 novel, a cool, dazzling book shot through with so many shifting ironies that virtually every reviewer has described it as unfilmable.

Well, Baumbach has filmed it, and though I can't call his adaptation a triumph, a lot of the reviews strike me as being ungenerous to a brave attempt. White Noise is bursting with fun things to watch. And though the story takes place in the 1980s, it tackles present day preoccupations: human-caused disaster, media saturation, drug addiction and consumerism.

Director Noah Baumbach tackles misinformation in 'White Noise,' wryly

A deglamorized Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, a professor in the popular department of Hitler Studies, a program he invented not because he admires der Führer but because Hitler is a strong brand in the intellectual marketplace.

Jack lives in a cozy college town, along with his slightly dippy fourth wife, Babette — played by Greta Gerwig with big, bouncy curls — and their kids from assorted marriages. Whether the Gladneys are all having breakfast or driving in their station wagon, their scenes crackle with the sometimes inane, sometimes pointed texture of family crosstalk.

Their story unfolds in three very different chapters, all tinged with satire. The first part lays out the Gladney's life. In the second, disaster-film chapter, a calamitous train wreck menaces their town with a so-called "airborne toxic event," whose foreboding black cloud forces them to flee to a camp for evacuees. Once that gets sorted out, the noirish third chapter tells the story of Babette's use of a mysterious drug called Dylar and the violence it engenders.

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Gerwig, baumbach poke at post-college pangs.

While this may make White Noise sound dauntingly dark, its default tone is actually jaunty, if ironically so. Baumbach creates scenes that recall popular TV shows like The Simpsons and Stranger Things , and in Don Cheadle 's character, a professor named Murray, you get an upbeat version of a Greek chorus who sounds happy as a clam no matter what he's discussing. In a great scene set in a classroom, Murray talks about the death of Elvis Presley , and, as in an academic battle of the bands, Jack tries to top him with the fall of Hitler.

Although Baumbach has a real gift for domestic realism, he's always been drawn to the audacity of the French New Wave. He loves its formal iconoclasm and juxtaposition of tones, from the lyrical to the intellectual to the silly. He attempts such a tonal collage here, and I regret to say, that his White Noise doesn't hold together as well as DeLillo's.

In fact, watching White Noise reminds me a bit of watching the work of the New Wave's greatest genius, Jean-Luc Godard , who was, as it happens, a huge influence on DeLillo. Godard's movies always tended to shuffle brilliant scenes with sections that leave you weak with boredom. You get the same unevenness here, but Baumbach is less intimidating than Godard or DeLillo, neither of whom ever worried about making the audience happy. Baumbach keeps White Noise on the lighter, less political side of the ledger, as in the joyous supermarket finale that's miles from DeLillo's trademark sense of paranoia and dread.

Laced with good jokes, the movie brims with terrific moments, be it Murray's magnificent riff on Hollywood car crashes — which he sees as an expression of American optimism — or the sly sequence at the evacuee camp that seems to come from a missing movie by Baumbach's friend and collaborator, Wes Anderson .

Early on, Jack and Babette have a talk in which each admits that they hope they die before the other. It's partly funny, partly not. And it underscores White Noise 's obsession with death, the fear of dying, and especially the countless ways we fend off that fear — by turning catastrophes into media spectacles, by reducing the genocidal Hitler to a kind of pop icon, by smoothing ourselves out with dodgy drugs and by pretending that the disasters we see on TV could never hit us. And, if all else fails, the movie assures us, we can always go shopping.

'White Noise' review: Noah Baumbach's disaster comedy is fascinating and frustrating

What do you do to forget that you will die?

Perhaps you throw yourself into altruistic activities, like teaching the elderly to exercise. Maybe you seek a sense of control by going to a supermarket, where the glossy aisles of products offer endless possibilities for decision and distraction. Or you could intellectualize endlessly to make your brain whir in such a way that it might ignore the dark cloud on the horizon. But in White Noise , the dark cloud won't relent. Under its threat of doom, writer/director Noah Baumbach searches for comedy. But amid its bleakness and a jarring blend of genres, his latest is more dizzying than entertaining. 

Based on Don DeLillo's 1985 novel of the same name, White Noise stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig as Jack and Babbette Gladney, an upper-middle-class couple whose life in a college town is bustling but seemingly blissful. That is, until the airborne toxic event.

A random twist of fate plops a big black cloud in view of their windows, which pitches their kids into a frenzy of speculation, paranoia, and rationalizations. Should the family evacuate? Will the privilege of their big house in a nice town shield them from disaster? Does any of their actions truly matter when death is inevitable? 

Noah Baumbach dips into horror and broad comedy in White Noise. 

The cloud proves an inciting incident that pitches Baumbach out of his comfort zone of sophisticated dramedy. Sure, like the heroes of his other films ( Frances Ha, The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story ), the Gladneys and their friends are a garrulous bunch, who can hyper-intellectualize everything from rock stars to parenthood and ennui. But cast outside the cozy anxieties of their home life, this family trips into new terrain for Baumbach, including realms of broad comedy and horror. 

In sequences where the community is frantically fleeing, White Noise takes on a National Lampoon's Vacation vibes, with Adam Driver as the flummoxed father, who pratfalls into preposterous gambles of parenthood, like retrieving a lost toy and racing blindly into a presumed shortcut. Though brief, these sequences are thrilling in part because they feel so unexpected from Baumbach. Even if you're familiar with DeLillo's novel, you might wonder what could come next, thanks to the seeming spontaneity of the film's jumps in tone. Plus Driver, who hasn't yet met a genre he can't chameleon into, is captivating as a bumbling patriarch, capturing the absurdity of these situations while grounding humor in a bouncy self-importance that keeps the possible apocalypse from feeling too foreboding. Yet Baumbach navigates into terror. 

That cloud rumbles upon Jack, like a slasher slowly lurking closer to an unwitting co-ed. The darkness looms as music by Danny Elfman grumbles with an electric sense of dread. Set in the '80s, the film's broad comedy bursts, horror scenes, and score play to aesthetic conventions of this era. But where Netflix's Stranger Things holds nostalgia for this time and its big hair and neon attire, White Noise has a smirk to this sentimentality for those day — the decade when death loomed in the forms of the Cold War and the AIDS crisis, yet American culture seemed relentlessly positive and aspiration-obsessed. 

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig make a wild pair in White Noise. 

As Jack, Driver is like a master juggler in his attempt to hold the terror of death at bay. For him, this includes balancing the endless chattering at home with his booming voice in lectures about Adolf Hitler, who he intellectualizes as an icon of death. The intensity that Driver has brought to his brooding villain in Star Wars and the caustic comic of Annette is channeled here into a bombastic lecture that veers into modern dance, with Don Cheadle as his partner, enthusiastically proclaiming the paralleled importance of Elvis Presley. Jack is a cocky and swaggering king of his domain until the cloud pitches him into a journey of self-doubt and challenging realizations. Then, he is a clown, and Driver leans into this downward spiral.

Meanwhile, Gerwig, who's recurringly been Baumbach's leading lady and creative contributor, initially embodies the go-go energy of the '80s, from Babette's ever-on-the-move sneakers to her angelic explosion of curly blonde hair. But beneath the bright smile and urgent reassurances to her spouse and kids, Babette quivers with an unspoken fear. She is a metaphor for the glossy veneer of the '80s and the terror that lies beneath the aerobic fits. White Noise makes knowing her a mystery that Jack — with the help of their eldest (a sharp Raffey Cassidy) — must solve.

As the film follows their dubious detective work, Gerwig's portrayal spins into darker terrain. Amid the rapid-fire banter, ferocious philosophizing, and scattershot plotting, she and Driver are compelling scene partners. So why did White Noise leave me cold? 

White Noise fumbles its final act. 

There's a lot to admire in Baumbach's White Noise . The earnest performance of his leads blends seamlessly with the boldly quirky portrayals from the supporting cast, which also includes Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André 3000. The filmmaker's branching into horror and broad comedy is refreshing and even thrilling. The dialogue not only boasts biting banter, but also a barrage of colliding conversations, where the point is not to process every line but perhaps be swept up in the sheer force of its noise and chaotic ideas. Yet amid all this conflict, chaos, and conversation, there's frustratingly little flow. 

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Perhaps its jarring nature is the point, never allowing the audience to settle comfortably into a comedy that is ultimately wryly laughing at humanity's attempt to ignore the discomfort of our own mortality. If so, congrats to Baumbach. I was riveted for the first half: leaping at jump scares, goose-pimpled in dread, smirking at the audacity of intellectual ego, and even cackling at abrupt physical comedy. The second half, however, lost me as it fumbled into a muddy path of noir and faith that makes its two hours and 19 minutes runtime feel achingly excessive. 

Ultimately, though I admire the ambition of Baumbach's adaptation, and how it pushed him as a filmmaker, I lost patience with his execution. After a while the shifts in tone feel too much like stuttering, turning the dialogue into an onslaught of exhausting lectures, the plot into a meandering plod, and the characters into abstractions rather than flesh-and-blood people. Perhaps devotees of DeLillo will be able to more easily tap into White Noise 's wavelength, but in the end, I was left wanting. 

White Noise is now on Netflix.

UPDATE: Dec. 19, 2022, 11:07 a.m. EST White Noise was reviewed out of the 60th New York Film Festival on October 12, 2022. This review has been republished, tied the film's Netflix debut.

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Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.

‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes

In this prophetic/topical/overly-spelled-out fable, Adam Driver, as an entitled professor, and Greta Gerwig, as his haunted pill-popping wife, lead a college-town clan on a collision course with disaster.

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In the early scenes, one recognizes, and responds with jittery pleasure, to the Baumbach touch. “White Noise” is set in a cozy leafy college town, which has grown up around a small liberal-arts school called The-College-on-the-Hill, and that makes the movie an ideal vehicle for the kind of high-spirited disputatious chatter that Baumbach is a wizard at. The central character, Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), teaches at the college, where he has pioneered an entire discipline devoted to Hitler Studies — which sounds like a Woody Allen joke, except that the film, like Jack, takes it all quite seriously. Jack isn’t just teaching about Hitler; he’s the excavator of the dictator’s soul, a rhapsodist of fascism.

Jack’s wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), has hair that looks like an ’80s perm (though in fact it’s natural) as well as an attitude that’s spiky enough to balance his exultant narcissism, and she pops mysterious pharmaceutical pills on the sly. They’ve each been married three times before, and between them they’ve got a reasonably well-adjusted brood of broken-home children: the sharp teenager Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and her sweet younger sister Steffie (May Nivola), who are Babette’s daughters, the chip-off-the-old-block brilliant talker Heinrich (Sam Nivola), who is Jack’s son, and a young son who is both of theirs. They’re like the Brady Bunch with a touch of the Sopranos, and Baumbach, for a while, keeps the family dialogue humming.

He also introduces us to Jack’s academic colleagues, who are treated as gently cracked without being mocked, notably Murray (Don Cheadle), who is some sort of American Studies professor with a profound take on the cheesiest dimensions of American society. He thinks that supermarkets are a deep form of nirvana, and the film opens with his lecture, illustrated by a dazzling montage of film clips, on the meaning of the car crash in Hollywood cinema, which he views as a pure expression of joy (and genius). In a way, this sets the tone for all that follows. It lets us know that “White Noise” is going to be, on some level, about violence and catastrophe, and that it’s going to regard those things with a funny and ironic sidelong eye.

The first clue that we’re watching more than just an observational comedy about a nutty professor and his fractured family comes when a man driving a truck full of toxic chemicals crashes into a train, and the accident produces a massive black chemical cloud that hovers in the distance, edging inexorably toward the town. Will it move in and poison everyone? As Jack and his family pile into their Chevy station wagon, evacuating in a miles-long traffic pile-up as portentous as the one in Godard’s “Weekend,” the film, just like that, becomes a metaphorical disaster movie about fear, conspiracy, and the toxicity of consumer products.

Those pills Babette pops turns out to be harbingers of the new world. They’re not uppers — they are, rather, mood stabilizers meant to quell her fear of death. Jack and Babette are both obsessed with death (their idea of screwball chatter is discussing which of the two of them is going to die first), and when Jack, during that toxic-cloud escape, steps out of the car for two minutes to fill the gas tank, he learns he may have gotten a lethal dose of chemicals. Or given how nuts the doctors in this film sound, is that diagnosis just another conspiracy?

These are heavy questions, and “White Noise,” on the page, achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, “White Noise” announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them. Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, “White Noise” has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news. How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of “New Body Rhumba” by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality “White Noise” could have used more of.  

Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins.

• Production: A Netflix release of an NBGG Pictures, Heyday Films production, in association with A24. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman, Uri Singer. Executive producers: Brian Bell, Leslie Converse.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera: Lol Crawley. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Danny Elfman.
• With: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Niviola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin, Sam Gold, Carlos Jacott, Lars Eidinger, Francis Jue, Barbara Sukowa.

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White Noise review — Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s unfilmable novel

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Review: ‘White Noise’ puts a loud, brash and enjoyable spin on a Don DeLillo classic

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“White Noise,” Noah Baumbach’s jittery and inventive adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, begins with what you might call a love letter to cinema. We’ve had a lot of those recently , but this one — a college lecture on car crashes in American movies — is appreciably sharper, funnier and more specific than most. As his students watch a montage of fiery vehicular explosions, professor Murray Jay Siskind (a wonderful Don Cheadle) implores them to look past the violence and see the spirit of optimism and enterprise pulsing underneath: “There’s a constant upgrading of tools, skills, a meeting of challenges,” he marvels. “The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something loud and fiery, head-on.”

Baumbach, a specialist in complicated human passions, appears to have taken the professor’s enthusiasm to heart. Before long, he’ll stage his own elemental pileup: An oil tanker truck T-bones a freight train, sending its chemical cargo flying every which way and igniting a conflagration that belches deadly black smoke into the sky. There’s nothing optimistic about what happens next, but the moment of collision is executed with undeniable gusto; Baumbach does, for a moment, seem like the proverbial kid playing with a big honkin’ train set. Here and elsewhere in “White Noise,” he happily applies himself to the upgrading of tools and skills, and to the meeting of the formidable, some would say foolhardy, challenge before him.

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DeLillo’s novel — bursting with theories both prescient and otherwise about consumerism, addiction, environmental decay, (mis)information overload and the universal if also uniquely American fear of death — has long been deemed unfilmable, as novels of ideas are reflexively assumed to be. In this case, there’s not only the danger of mishandling the author’s satirical targets or the icy precision of his latex-glove sentences, but also the risk of approximating them too closely, of locking them away in a remote, often fondly nostalgized ’80s moment and draining them of their corrosive, unsettling power.

Baumbach does not quite surmount this obstacle; an eerie climax and one pretty good jump scare aside, the terror here belongs more to the characters and their era than it does to us and ours. But his affection for the novel produces its own warm, countervailing energy. Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

Here, in the domestically contented but existentially paranoid flesh, are Jack Gladney (Adam Driver, paunchy) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig, curly), raising four kids, three from past marriages, in a college town whose heart is its campus and whose soul is its supermarket. Lol Crawley’s grainy-textured widescreen images (shot on 35-millimeter anamorphic film) steer us through the messy living spaces and immaculate grocery aisles of a postmodern “Brady Bunch,” where boxes of Tide and cans of Coca-Cola gleam out at us with an almost otherworldly sheen. (Jess Gonchor’s production design nails the ’80s vibe and branding perfectly.)

We also spend some time with Jack’s professor colleagues (they include a curt Jodie Turner-Smith and a delightful André Benjamin) as they hold intellectual court, never more mesmerizingly than when Jack and Murray deliver a dual lecture comparing and contrasting the early lives of Hitler and Elvis. Jack is one of the country’s leading professors of Hitler studies, which makes his limited grasp of German his most embarrassing secret, at least initially. (Here it may be worth noting the presence of at least two marvelous German actors, Lars Eidinger and the veteran Barbara Sukowa, both perfectly cast in crucial roles.)

Babette, who teaches posture classes for the elderly, is hiding her own deep, dark secret, namely the pills she keeps popping when she thinks no one’s looking. But except for their adorable toddler, Wilder (played by Dean and Henry Moore), their kids notice everything and delight in challenging parental authority, especially Babette’s stubborn, concerned daughter Denise (a terrific Raffey Cassidy) and Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), a fount of pessimistic data who’s the first one to notice that deadly black cloud headed their way.

Until that point, “White Noise” has found a pleasurable sweet spot between the Baumbachian and the DeLillo-esque. Much of the tetchy, disorienting domestic banter, with its volleys of data and non-sequitur factoids, comes straight from the novel, even as the disorienting screwball rhythms (the editing is by Matthew Hannam) and the overlapping lines of dialogue hark back to the director’s earlier comedies like “The Meyerowitz Stories” and “Mistress America.” But once its famous “airborne toxic event” is set in motion and the entire town is forced to evacuate, the movie, like Danny Elfman’s wondrously nimble score, kicks into overdrive. Soon Jack, Babette and the kids are on the run in their station wagon, with death looming in the rearview mirror and some vintage Spielberg riffs on the road ahead.

The pitch-perfect mimicry of ’80s action-thriller clichés — just count how many garbage cans get knocked over by cars screeching in reverse — is something only a contemporary retooling of a retro story could have pulled off. That knowing playfulness is part of the movie’s charm; so is the spectacle of Baumbach, a master of intimate, small-scaled comedy, embracing the conventions of the big-budget apocalyptic thriller, complete with lethal lightning storms, an unexpected river cruise and endless, chaotic traffic jams.

But Baumbach doesn’t stop there. He may faithfully adhere to the novel’s three-act structure (the rhythm of its many short, self-contained chapters proves more elusive), but his shrewdest and most suitably postmodern gesture is to offer up a highly elastic palimpsest of allusions, genres and styles. Primarily a domestic-romantic drama and a satire of academia before it becomes a full-blown disaster epic, “White Noise” also morphs, in its climactic stretch, into a seedy motel-room noir, a Monty Python sketch and, supremely, an LCD Soundsystem dance musical. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

This stylistic verve can sometimes feel liberating, an inspired rejoinder to the clinical perfection of DeLillo’s prose. And sometimes it can feel like too much, to the point of becoming absorbed and lost within the story’s white-noise barrage: the marketing slogans, the academic bull sessions, the pointless government directives when all hell breaks loose. Maybe that’s the point. For DeLillo purists and scholars, surely the movie’s least forgiving audience, Baumbach’s attempts at narrative compression will seem especially glaring. He has streamlined the book’s cast — gone is Babette’s gun-supplying dad — and trimmed or removed some of its choicest aphorisms. In trying to both preserve and open up a much-canonized text, he sometimes falls into an all-too-familiar adaptive compromise.

Some of Jack’s mordant first-person insights on the page have been reassigned to other characters on the screen, a shift for which Driver’s performance compensates to no small degree. He’s entirely believable as the outwardly impressive but inwardly insecure academic, desperate to maintain a sunny outlook even under fast-darkening skies. Jack may be the most ridiculous of the glaringly imperfect spouses Driver has played recently (in “Annette” and “Marriage Story”), and also the most redeemable. Gerwig is no less movingly misguided as Babette, who — like her husband, but through more extreme measures — tries to sublimate fears, both rational and irrational, of impending doom.

“We are fragile characters surrounded by hostile facts,” Babette notes, tweaking without materially changing a sentiment from the novel. The absurdity of these characters is inseparable from their pathos, and the director’s obvious affection for them, and for his two lead actors, makes them more affecting still. The warmth of feeling that suffuses the movie’s final moments may not be the most faithful salute to DeLillo, but it is very much the point of this “White Noise.”

‘White Noise’

In English and German with English subtitles Rated: R, for brief violence and language Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles, and Bay Theater, Pacific Palisades; starts streaming Dec. 30 on Netflix

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‘white noise’ review: adam driver and noah baumbach take a bold stab but don delillo’s novel still seems unfilmable.

Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle also star in Netflix's Venice opener, an absurdist apocalyptic vision of one family grappling with the specter of disaster and death in a world spinning off its axis.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Charithra chandran joins 'one piece' season 2 at netflix, 'bojack horseman' creator sets new adult animated comedy at netflix, white noise.

That perception doesn’t change a lot with this valiant Netflix adaptation. It feels like the streaming service was so high on the deserved critical acclaim for Baumbach’s Marriage Story that they gave him carte blanche and a mountain of cash to make his passion project, a property that had defeated more than one filmmaker in development hell before him.

This is Baumbach’s third feature for Netflix, and its greatest strength recalls the first of those, The Meyerowitz Stories — the affectionate observation of a rambunctious family who tend to talk all at once, often at cross-purposes.

Here it’s the blended family of Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) and his wife Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), each of them on their fourth marriage and raising the children of previous unions — Jack’s analytically inclined teenage son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and sensitive younger daughter Steffie (May Nivola); and Babette’s hard-nosed 11-year-old Denise (Raffey Cassidy), vigilantly monitoring her mother’s neurotic behavior; as well as the 6-year-old son they had together, Wilder (played by twins Henry and Dean Moore).

A gaggle of caustically opinionated professors — including characters played by Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin and New York theater director Sam Gold — provides texture. The most substantially fleshed out of them is Murray Sisskind (a wonderful intellectual caricature from Don Cheadle ), who teaches a course in pop-cultural iconography that, right off the bat, will make you want to enroll.

Murray opens the film with a class on the car crash in Hollywood movies, rhapsodizing about the “secular optimism and self-celebration” delivered in big-screen auto collisions, each one more spectacular than the last. He enthuses over footage of mangled metal and flaming wreckage, admiring a carefree, lighthearted quality that foreign movies could never approach. One of the standout set-pieces of this enjoyable early section is an impromptu joint lecture in which Jack lends his campus rock-star mystique to Murray’s class as they parallel the lives of two mythic figures, Hitler and Elvis Presley, respectively.  

At home, Jack and Babette both fret about being the first to die, left to face the abyss alone. Death is a hot topic in the ramshackle house, with the kids rushing to the TV to watch news coverage of a plane crash.

So far so good. It’s when Baumbach’s script shifts from wry situational observation into more concrete plot incident that the material starts showing its age and the literary roots become more cumbersome.

There are fun touches, like science geek Heinrich gaining social confidence as he regales the crowd of evacuees at a camp with his detailed insights. But the film overall becomes steadily less involving — and more grating in its quirks — as it explores both the ecological and emotional fallout of the chemical spill.

The focus starts to seem pulled in too many directions, including the proliferation of conspiracy theories; the family’s concern over secretive Babette’s memory lapses due to an experimental anxiety drug called Dylar; the role of a shadow figure known as Mr. Gray (Lars Eidinger); and Murray planting the idea in Jack’s head that perhaps he can overcome his own fear of death by taking someone else’s life.

The power of violence and terror to reunite families in troubled times still seems a ripe notion for satire, as does the American dependence on pharmaceuticals for comfort and the long reach of eco-messes in our lives. But the movie’s manic machinations become less, not more, connected to any tangible contemporary reality, making it play like a period piece trapped in amber. Even rollicking sequences like Jack and brood speeding away from danger in the family station wagon, temporarily set adrift on a river, don’t build much comic momentum.

As the pilot for all this mayhem, Driver certainly commits; he makes amusing use of his outsize physical presence by swooping around the College-on-the-Hill campus wearing his academic gown like a vampire’s cape.

Gerwig, sporting a mop of tight curls that Murray describes as “important hair,” fades away much like her character, who spends stretches of the movie staring out a window in sweats, lost in numbed anxiety. The kids remain more captivating, with Sam and May Nivola (the children of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer) making lively impressions, while Cassidy is an appealingly bossy presence, in many ways the most responsible figure in the house.

“We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts,” says Murray late in the action, articulating a thesis about learning to shut out that world, however temporarily, that coheres only intermittently in the film. More apropos is Jack’s comment near the start: “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can.” Only in the closing supermarket dance explosion does that exhortation become truly infectious. Despite the movie’s inconsistency, at least it sends you out on a high.

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White Noise Reviews

Baumbach captures the novel’s emphasis on death and society’s attitude towards it.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 21, 2024

If anything, White Noise shows that being overtly faithful to a pre-existing source from another medium can fundamentally lead to a film’s downfall.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 17, 2024

It is never completely all together, but allows itself to be so free and playful about the bindings of its genres that when the end-credits sequence appears, you’re absolutely convinced that [White Noise] is worthy of such a credits sequence

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 4, 2024

Instead of something that speaks directly to the present, it’s a period piece... There’s not much fun in a film where everyone’s just looking at Twitter. But without its eerie relevance, it’s not quite clear why this film even exists.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

At its best, Noah Baumbach’s impressive and thoroughly decent adaptation of White Noise interestingly discusses people’s relatable ownership of secrets yet complete inability to internalize them.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

The banter and responses between Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig were so sharp, witty, and brilliant that if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they were married in real life.

Full Review | Sep 23, 2023

Not only do these numerous subplots fail to cohere into an actual story, but each is approached with such detachment that it feels like you're watching them unfold through several miles of plexiglass via a telescope from the other side of the galaxy.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 16, 2023

Fans unfamiliar with the novel may be disappointed that the film does not feel like a Baumbach film – without credits, it could be mistaken for Wes Anderson – and find the story pulls punches in the end when it feel like more oomph is needed.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The movie limits itself to its title, that is, it remains within the "noise" and doesn't get to the "background" of the themes it satirizes, specifically fear. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 28, 2023

Admirers of Baumbach will smile at the ways in which White Noise embodies his longtime preoccupations and simultaneously points toward bold new possibilities...

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

White Noise is a mumblecore indie film with a Spielbergian disaster at its core. It’s grander than anything Baumbach has done before, and may likely do again. The film is a biting satire of our times, plucked out of the 1980s.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

There might be occasions where you see Bambach struggling with the hefty source material, but, in conclusion, he delivers a worthy adaptation filled with empathy and dismay, both in captivating equal measures.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

White Noise is a film that absolutely shouldn’t work, and yet it does.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2023

While frustrating that it cant’ quite replicate the enjoyable messiness of its first hour across its whole runtime, White Noise is an enjoyable swing from all involved, a complete departure from Noah Baumbach’s previous work

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2023

An unforgettable movie about family, disasters, consumerism, addiction, and finding meaning in surprising places.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 28, 2023

White Noise pretends to depict America in the middle of a waking nightmare, but it’s a privileged person’s nightmare.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2023

something of a mess, but in a great, enthralling, engaging kind of way

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2023

Even amid the hijinks, an affecting score from Danny Elfman, and the instantly catchy LCD Soundsystem song that ties the chaos together, White Noise can’t sustain itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2023

DeLillo’s story may be almost 40 years old, but in the wake of the pandemic it has taken on a new resonance.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2023

To call ‘White Noise’ unconventional is to put it, well, mildly. It is a fragmented mess of a plot, yes. It is wildly a spectacle, yes.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Feb 14, 2023

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White Noise review: Noah Baumbach wrestles with a brilliant, impossible novel

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig go deep into a 1980s fever dream in the director's intriguing but uneven adaptation.

Postmodernism is a hell of a drug. In the opening chapter of Don Delillo's classic 1985 novel White Noise , a college professor named Jack Gladney relays the ordinary details of his world: a wife, four children, the daily campus grind. He speaks of station wagons and airport Marriotts, corduroyed coworkers and trips to the grocery store. And yet nearly every line wriggles with surreal comedy, panicky and elastic and preposterously alive. For several decades, various Hollywood luminaries tried and failed to take it on; Noah Baumbach is the first to succeed, and his adaptation, which had its North American premiere last night at the New York Film Festival before it lands on Netflix this December, feels like a film made with deep respect and affection for its source material. But it also seems, in nearly every scene, like he's dancing about architecture, trying to wrest something from the strange magic of those pages that refuses to be translated to the screen.

It helps that he has two of his favorite collaborators to help carry the load: Adam Driver , whom he's now worked with five times, is the garrulous, Buddha-bellied Jack, and Greta Gerwig , another regular coconspirator and also Baumbach's partner in life, is Jack's wife Babette, a suburban goddess in a blonde spiral perm. It's the fourth marriage for them both and soft middle-age is settling in, though they're still almost unfailingly hot for each other in and out of the bedroom. There are also three children from previous unions — imperious teen Denise (Raffey Cassidy), along with Heinrich and Steffie (real siblings Sam and May Nivola) — and one small product of their own, a beaming cherub named Wilder. Life in the Gladney house carries on in a state of messy domestic bliss, tempered with the usual petty irritations and complaints, until the day a highly flammable tankard collides with a train outside of town, and a noxious black plume appears on the horizon.

Soon the plume has been upgraded to something officials are calling an Airborne Toxic Event, though semantics don't really explain what that means for all the distraught humans on the ground. Ordered to evacuate, they set out for temporary shelter, one more freaked-out family in a tangle of standstill traffic and hazmat tents. But what are the little white pills that Babette keeps surreptitiously popping, insisting it's just air or cherry LifeSavers when she's pressed? If you're familiar with the book, you may have some recall of what follows, though Noise is hardly linear in any traditional sense of plot or pacing.

Baumbach lays out numerous setpieces — at the college where Jack teaches Hitler Studies; in the stacked, gleaming aisles of the local A&P; even an unscheduled car ride down a river — with high auteur style, steeped in the shiny consumerism and thrumming low-grade paranoia of peak-'80s America. He draws great, zesty performances from his supporting cast, including Don Cheadle as a garrulous fellow professor, and the German actress Barbara Sukowa as an ornery apostate nun. (Nobody casts extras like him, too; they have faces ). Driver brings something both salty and haunted to Jack, and Gerwig feels like a beating heart, alive to every sunburst and storm cloud of her emotional weather.

But they all have to reckon with dialogue whose satirical fizz and deadpan rhythms don't often translate to anything resembling real life, and a book whose brilliance stubbornly resists any other medium but itself. Compared to the tender groundedness of Baumbach's finest films, like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story , the scampering leaps and feints of his script here come off as deliberately arch, even artificial. The movie's final scene, though, without spoiling too much, is also easily its best: a bravura grocery-store dance sequence anachronistically soundtracked by the Brooklyn art-pop band LCD Soundsystem that recalls everything from Jacques Demy's French New Wave classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to the 2003 Japanese marvel The Blind Swordsman . It's nothing like the ending of the novel, and maybe that's why it's so good: a moment of pure unfettered inspiration, joyful in its own noise. Grade: B–

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Venice Review: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise Is a Lot of Talking With Not So Much to Say

D on DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise is the kind of book that earns review quotes like “Mordantly funny and ultimately moving,” the book critic’s way of chortling knowingly while also making sure we know he’s taking this thing seriously. Noah Baumbach’s movie version of White Noise —the opening-night film of the 79th Venice Film Festival—is knowing and self-serious in the same way, a movie about the American condition, whatever that is, that feels beamed in from the planet of the chuckling beard strokers. It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of it.

The movie, like the book, is set in a middle-American college town in the 1980s, with a main character, Jack Gladney (played by Adam Driver), whose specialty is Hitler studies—he proudly invented this line of study in 1968 and has been rolling with it ever since. He lives in one of those comfortable academic’s houses, sporting floral wallpaper and lots of natural woodwork, with his wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), and their children from previous marriages, plus one son they created together. Their life is mundane and uneventful, if talky. Then a toxic cloud drifts into their environs, prompting mass evacuation and, worse, existential thoughts. This is a story about the fear of death, the nature of love and our purpose as sentient organisms in a consumer society. Or something like that.

Read more: The 52 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2022

Baumbach adapted the novel himself, and he hews closely in tone to DeLillo’s book, alerting us clearly when it’s supposed to be drily funny and when we might be moved to shed a thoughtful tear. Driver’s Jack loves his life, though he seems afraid to admit it, preferring to spin out intersecting lines of questions and observations. When a student in one of his classes—he’s a professor at a school with the winkingly generic name College on the Hill—asks about Claus von Stauffenberg’s failed plot to kill Hitler, he responds with a soliloquy as twitchily superior as a pince-nez: “All plots move deathward. This is the nature of plots.” Later, as a guest in the classroom of his colleague, Murray (Don Cheadle), he and his friend launch into a call-and-response lecture linking Elvis Presley and Hitler in a web of similarities that’s confident but dumb. Both loved dogs! Both had mothers who smothered them! These are the kinds of thoughts generated by people with too much time on their hands, or by academics brought to life by writers with too much faith in their own cleverness.

Jack also loves his wife, though he doesn’t fully understand her. Gerwig’s Babette is good-natured, a little flaky, a robust figure of womanhood in her jogging outfits. She and Jack have the kind of jaunty-but-serious conversations people have in books, wondering aloud, for example, which of them will die first. “Life is good, Jack,” she tells her husband as the two lie entwined in bed. “I just feel it has to be said.” Much of the movie’s dialogue comes straight from DeLillo, to the point where the actors seem to be reciting memorized language rather than acting. Meanwhile, the children who are old enough to speak do a lot of it. (They’re played by Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, and May Nivola.) They chatter away, asking so many questions that most go unanswered; they also proffer information and misinformation about things like what, exactly, camels store in their humps. They represent the precious chaos of family life, the very thing that’s threatened not just by the kind of “airborne toxic event” that sweeps into Jack and Babette’s comfortable little town, but by the secret that Babette has been keeping from her husband, one whose revelation sends the movie tumbling into intentional absurdity in the movie’s final act.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

The hope, maybe, is that the audience will respond properly to the film’s mannered yuks and take cautious pleasure in its “life is good, sort of” resolution. Baumbach is clear about the fact that this is an adaptation of a book that’s now almost 40 years old: he stylizes everything, from the squirrelly spirals of Babette’s hairdo to the brisk yet soothing color tones of the college cafeteria. It all seems a little unreal, by design—everything feels signaled rather than felt, which is true of DeLillo’s book, too. The effect is distancing to the point of smugness. Baumbach even ends the movie with a supermarket ballet, a riot of color and movement set amid aisles chock-full of all sorts of things money can buy. This is the American way, the movie seems to be saying, and that’s OK. Or if it’s not OK, it’s just the way things are, so may as well go with it. It’s hard to know exactly what Baumbach is going for here, other than perhaps reminding us that the key to living is just going about your life. But you probably don’t need two hours and 16 minutes’ worth of movie to tell you that.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach’s Don DeLillo Adaptation Is Inspired — and Exasperating

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022  Venice  Film Festival. Netflix releases the film in select theaters on Friday, November 25, with a streaming release to follow on Friday, December 30.

You might think it would be strange to see a mega-budget Noah Baumbach movie complete with CGI explosions, a Spielbergian kind of holy terror, and even one sadistically drawn-out jump-scare dream sequence, but the oddest thing about “ White Noise ” is its persistent sense of déjà vu . Not just the déjà vu of watching such a faithful adaptation of any Great American Novel — although there’s plenty of that — but also the déjà vu that’s supposedly caused by exposure to the Airborne Toxic Event at the center of Don DeLillo’s 1985 book, a prescient and enduringly tender Polaroid of our late capitalist society in which life has become indistinguishable from its own imitation, and death has become a thing that only happens to other people.

Fittingly, if not always to its credit, Baumbach’s film is split between seeming brand-new and all too familiar at the same time; equal parts inspired and exasperating, his “White Noise” is like hearing a sound and its echo all at once. At best, this adaptation uses that uncanniness to its advantage, leveraging its uniquely cinematic language to illustrate the role that movies play in creating the false memories that help distance us from the reality of our own demise (and contribute to the demise of our own reality).

At worst, Baumbach’s “White Noise” is made so wobbly by that uncanniness that it starts to feel as if it’s not an adaptation of DeLillo’s novel so much as an overworked distillation of its aura. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA isn’t in the movie because it becomes the movie itself: A picture of a picture that only allows us to see what others have already seen before. That’s what cinema is, of course, but that’s not all that it can be.

The touristic essence of Baumbach’s “White Noise” traces back to the filmmaker’s obvious affection for DeLillo’s writing, and to the many overlaps between their work: The affectless intermingling between love and cruelty, a shared penchant for what novelist Richard Powers refers to as “academic burlesque,” and a mutual understanding of the way that people cling to such language and crumbs of knowledge like driftwood to keep them from drowning in life’s chaos along with everyone else. Noah Baumbach has never written a character who wouldn’t lie to their doctor.

Outside of director adaptations like “Cosmopolis,” few movies have ever captured the author’s spirit better than Wes Anderson’s Baumbach-scripted “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the ethos of which — “We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts” — owes far more to DeLillo than it does to Roald Dahl. Ditto its forgiving take on the role of family in a consumer-driven civilization (“These apples look fake, but at least they’ve got stars on them”), and its supermarket dance finale, which Baumbach euphorically recreates at the end of “White Noise” with some help from LCD Soundsystem.

Remember the bit in “Greenberg” when Ben Stiller asks Chris Messina if his pool can overflow, only for Messina to snap: “Yes, the pool can fucking overflow!” Good luck thinking of anything else when professor Jack Gladney (a pot-bellied Adam Driver , sandpapering his signature ferality with a newly paternal softness) is evacuating his family away from the apocalyptic cloud of black chemicals that’s formed in the sky above their liberal college town. Played by a poodle-haired Greta Gerwig — inches away from going full Carol White — Jack’s fourth wife Babette comforts her 14-year-old stepson (Sam Nivola) that they won’t run out of gas. “There’s always extra,” she says. “How can there always be extra?,” the kid shoots back. Everybody knows they can’t just keep going forever, and yet modern life has made it so easy to believe that you will; no wonder this story’s flirtation with simulation theory has the whiff of wishful thinking.

DeLillo suggested that such belief was sustained by the ritualistic distancing from death; that America’s obsessions with shopping and spectacle, both of which achieved a new garishness during the Reagan era, are modern reactions to the same raw fear that has backstopped every religion since time immemorial. The low hum of the flourescent lights on aisle five helps muffle our mortal terror — so do the commercial jingles on TV (“Who wears short shorts?”) and the disaster footage the local news shares with us as soon as the ad breaks are over. Those other people are dead, which reinforces our faith that we are not like them. Jack teaches “Hitler studies” because nothing makes him feel safer than the belief that history’s most spectacular episode of dying is just behind him.

Professor Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ), Jack’s Elvis-obsessed colleague at the College-on-the-Hill, is addicted to car crash scenes in movies for much the same reason: To him, they are orgiastic monuments to life. Flaming shrines of naive innocence. He edits them into celebratory supercuts for his students, the faked carnage blurring into an explosive affirmation of real life. In what will prove to be one of his more radical deviations from DeLillo’s text, Baumbach refashions Suskind’s mid-book lecture (“I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism!”) into the electric prologue of this “White Noise,” setting the stage for a manic film of ideas that genuinely sympathizes with — and takes a certain giddiness in — the various coping mechanisms we use to ignore the deathward march of our own lives.

Baumbach recognizes that spectacle has evolved since 1985, but one of the strengths of his “White Noise” is that he recognizes how little has changed about its role in society. Not only does this adaptation refuse to update DeLillo’s story — the film’s sublime costumes, sets, and lighting taking softly fetishistic pleasure in every teal windbreaker, halogen lamp, and noir-tinged sheet of “Paris, Texas”-inspired neon green — it seeks to return the text to a time before it was diffused by all of the fiction it predicted.

Baumbach burns through DeLillo’s plot (such as it is) in a hurry, the writer-director more focused on careening between dark comedy and light terror than he is on getting to know the characters who are forced to go along for the ride. He ditches entire branches of Jack’s family in order to savor the novel’s show-stopping moments; the lecture duel between Jack and Murray is shot with the same “you gotta see this!” glee and kineticism as the dojo scene in “The Matrix.”

We know that Jack and Babette are still horny for each other despite everything, that she takes mysterious pills called Dylar that seem to mess with her memory, and that they both feel safe for the time being because it’s pretty rare for upper-middle-class white parents to die while their kids are still young enough to live at home. Jack’s colleagues — a group that also features Jodie Turner-Smith and the newly appointed patron saint of fun supporting roles in mainstream art films, André Benjamin — are mostly there to offset the poignancy of Jack’s voiceover (cribbed verbatim from the book) and keep things from growing too serious.

One hundred and four pages flash by in about 33 minutes of proto-Baumbachian conniptions and banter — much of which feels straitjacketed by DeLillo’s writing, as if Baumbach’s scabrousness were losing a war against his love for the source material — a big jolt is mixed into the warning that “whatever relaxes you is dangerous,” and then a truck crashes into a rail car and releases a “Nope”-like cloud of death over Jack’s entire life. That’s when things get really interesting.

If the first act of “White Noise” feels like a work of expert-level pantomime, the similarly faithful second act somehow creates an energy all its own. Baumbach knows that DeLillo anticipated the likes of “The Matrix,” “The Truman Show,” and scads of other stories in which reality becomes a simulation of itself, but those aren’t the movies he wants to remind you of here. A crucial difference between the “White Noise” of 2022 and the “White Noise” of 1985 is that Baumbach has already seen the movies that DeLillo’s book helped to inspire, and that frees him to have some fun with this one.

As Jack, Babette, and the four younger members of their blended brood (a terrific group that also includes Raffey Cassidy and May Nivola) attempt to flee the airborne toxic effect, trying to suss out how safe they should feel amid the traffic jam of other families trying to do the same thing, Baumbach switches to a register that we’ve never seen from him before. Suddenly we’re in “War of the Worlds” territory, complete with oodles of Spielberg Face and a menacing awe so artful and evocative that it feels more like the real thing than a commentary on it. Something I never thought I’d write about a Baumbach film: The CGI is fantastic.

The evacuation sequences viscerally convey the appeal of disaster movies by clinging to a character who refuses to accept that he’s in one (at least at first), or to acknowledge that death can still find him in a large crowd. Baumbach’s visual language ensures that we have no such trouble. We’ve seen “Independence Day,” “Deep Impact,” and enough films of its ilk to recognize what a massive disaster supposedly looks like, but Jack — living in 1985 — doesn’t have the same frame of reference. To him, his situation doesn’t feel like a movie, and so he’s slow to recognize it as a disaster (a phenomenon illustrated in the brilliant shot of a black cloud swallowing the glow of a Shell logo just above Jack’s shoulder). We have the opposite problem, and it epitomizes why “White Noise” may be even more relevant today than it was 37 years ago: When we reckon with a disaster that seems too much like a movie, we struggle to accept that it’s real. As a character puts it in the book, and possibly also in this film: “For most people there are only two places in the world: Where they live and their TV set.”

Baumbach has an absolute field day with this dissonance; the closer his characters veer towards danger, the more that Baumbach exaggerates the movie-ness of their existence. A dramatic car chase is shot like a scene from an ’80s road trip comedy like “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” complete with a slow-motion shot of the family station flying through the air. A climactic showdown in a seedy motel — the end of the Dylar affair — drips with De Palma, all the way down to an unmissable split-diopter shot.

It’s a good thing the movie’s semiotic pleasures are so pronounced, because the book’s more basic charms don’t quite survive the trip to the big screen (let alone the ride home to Netflix). That third act gunplay is typical of an adaptation that’s always smart and on edge, but seldom involving enough beyond that. DeLillo’s writing gives readers the space to see their own existential terror reflected back at them in the funhouse mirror of Jack’s absurd circumstances, but Baumbach’s “White Noise” — more externalized by default — proves too arch for our emotions to penetrate.

Baumbach’s film is so determined to feel like “White Noise” that it ends up wearing the novel like a costume, a sensation epitomized by its lead performance. Driver is far too young to play the 51-year-old Jack (even if 38 was the 51 of 1985), though his middle-aged cosplay contributes to the general air of simulacra. More difficult to excuse is the actor’s struggle to sell the journey of Jack’s epiphanies. Driver is so naturally wild with life that he never quite musters the latent fear needed to fuel his character through the first act; it’s the same reason why the self-possession Jack finds in the third act feels less earned than it does inevitable. It’s a fitting anchor for an adaptation that gets everything so right that you might yearn for the friction that comes with getting it wrong, or at least the tension that comes from pulling away.

It’s no coincidence that the film’s most ecstatic moments — the first scene, the last scene, and the Spielbergian chaos that runs down the middle — are also the ones that most deviate from the book. Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume. The sound of a beeping smoke alarm, perhaps.

“White Noise” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival . Netflix will release it in select theaters and on Netflix later this year.

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White Noise review – Noah Baumbach and the cast are all at their best in one of the best films of the year

White Noise is adapted from the Don DeLillo book of the same name and follows the family of Jack Gladney, a Professor of Hitler Studies, as they learn to deal with life, death, and the Airborne Toxic Event.

We review the Netflix film White Noise (2022), which does not contain spoilers.

White noise is described as a constant background noise that is used to drive out other sounds. It is a noise that can help suppress thoughts, but it is only temporary as when the sound fades, all other noises come flushing back through. The film  White Noise (2022) , based on the book by Don DeLillo , attempts to do the same, except in this case it’s not the noise that is being driven out, it’s death; more specifically the fear of it.

This is a high concept that is tackled in many different forms of media, and trying to find a new approach, while adapting this novel, would prove challenging for anyone. Coming off the heels of his most personal film yet ( Marriage Story ), Noah Baumbach decided that he was done making intimate small-scale portrayals of humankind, at least for now, and instead chose to go in quite a different route. White Noise is that different route, and is as out there from a visual and thematic standpoint that one might expect from someone like Charlie Kaufmann , but not something anyone expected from Baumbach.

Changing up style so drastically definitely comes with its risks, but pulling it off can alter the way people see you as a director; what Baumbach manages to pull off here is nothing short of greatness. However, surprisingly it is the direction that stands out far more than the screenplay. This doesn’t mean the screenplay is bad by any means, having to adapt a novel that has been labeled “unadaptable” would prove difficult for any screenwriter, and Baumbach does his absolute best at bringing out these themes in dialogue and subtext, but how he films it all is truly magnificent.

He has a visual understanding of what this novel is trying to say and mesmerizingly is able to display and control every scene. At times, it feels like a Spielberg adventure movie and a Kaufmann metaphysical exploration all combined into one. There is a pretentious nature to it that feels earned and deserved, and never out of place within the story. From a technical standpoint, this is Baumbach’s best work to date. It’s his most visually compelling and all-out direction that makes this film work, but what makes it work as well as it does is the fully committed performances from the entire cast.

Everyone here is phenomenal, Don Cheadle and Greta Gerwig both provide brilliant performances that easily rank among their best, but it is Adam Driver who truly gives this wacky and complex film his all. In his second straight project with the director, Adam Driver elevates his already impressive career with a splendid performance of self-assuredness and perpetual fear. Driver plays Jack Gladney, a Professor who specializes in Hitler Studies, and is obsessed with the fear of death; how this fear can drive people to desperate measures.

There is a tonal shift when the climax comes that alters everything you might be thinking about this film. It is a shift that works so well because of Baumbach and the cast and completely ties together the themes of the film in a stellar way that leads all the way up to one of the best endings, and credits sequences, I have seen in quite some time.

Top to bottom,  White Noise is a hypnotic and engaging look into a profoundly human fear: death. Noah Baumbach’s best direction to date coupled with a fully committed cast — the standout being Adam Driver — makes White Noise not just one of the most entertaining and best films of the year, but also one of the most compelling.

What did you think of the Netflix film White Noise (2022)? Comment below.

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Article by Jacob Throneberry

Jacob Throneberry joined Ready Steady Cut in February 2022 and is a member of the NC Film Critics and NA Film Critic Associations. Jacob is also a graduating student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington doing a Master’s Program in Film Studies. He has applied his main hobby to building a career, becoming a trusted film critic and writer.

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White Noise (2022) Movie Review – Musings on the inevitability of death

Musings on the inevitability of death.

It may come as a surprise that Noah Baumbach ( Frances Ha , Marriage Story ) would depart from his personal, naturalist style to make White Noise , an absurdist film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s famous 1985 novel. But look closer and you’ll see relatable themes just as those that have long interested the director. Predominantly, in this case, the universal struggle against the inevitability of death.

Like most of us, I’d wager, White Noise ’s characters are afraid of death–and this film was perhaps born of the same fear. It was 2020, at the start of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, that Baumbach reread DeLillo’s book and found parallels to our own dark times.

Baumbach proceeded to faithfully follow the novel in his movie, which follows Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a college professor of his self-created Hitler Studies department. He and wife number 4 Babette (Greta Gerwig) have four kids, together and from different marriages.

Jack’s days are spent helping colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) create his own Elvis Studies department, taking clandestine German lessons to prepare for an upcoming Hitler conference, and worrying about Babette’s use of a mysterious pill called Dylar–but mainly, in delighting in his beloved family. Utterly in love with each other and with life, Jack and Babette can’t abide the thought of dying or losing each other. But intrusive thoughts soon become a realer possibility when a train wreck releases deadly chemicals into the air of their town, creating a situation called the “airborne toxic event.”

DeLillo’s novel has long been considered unadaptable due in part to its complex explorations of death, consumer culture, technology, and intellectualism–just to name a few themes. In a little over two hours, Baumbach unsurprisingly isn’t able to mine the depths of DeLillo’s work, but does give a valiant effort.

One could even say he’s too faithful with the source material, rigidly transposing dialogue straight from the page. This works occasionally to highlight the absurdity of everyday conversation–until calculated banter awkwardly gives way to a stiff statement from Jack that was never meant to be anything but his inner voice.

Above all, Baumbach captures the novel’s emphasis on death and society’s attitude towards it. There’s a scene in the book, only alluded to by Jack’s daughter Steffie in the film, where the grade school has to evacuate due to kids “getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths.” No one knows what caused it, although investigators give a long list of potential reasons: “the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation…” The list goes on. It’s not until dangerous symptoms stare school officials right in the face that they are enabled to act. What DeLillo accomplishes through this scene–that contradictory mix of fear and callousness toward death–permeates throughout Baumbach’s adaptation. The message is both extremely current and for all time.

The “airborne toxic event” plot is resolved fairly quickly so the film can move on to other “deathward” plots. And although the emotional climax is somewhat harried and flat, maybe that’s the point. One distraction, and the horrors of this world become only white noise in the background, washed up by the bright colors of consumerism–but also the presence of loved ones. There’s a compelling blend of hope and dread, then, in one of 2022’s last film releases.

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• Verdict - 7.5/10 7.5/10

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Review: 'White Noise' is a sign of respect to a virtuoso but never completely breaks free

To understand “White Noise,” the new Noah Baumbach movie now streaming on Netflix, extend the definition of the term to the clamor of the modern media world that distracts us from reality to clear a poison path to rampant consumerism.

Got that? No worries. In his first film adapted from another writer’s work (the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo), Baumbach (“Marriage Story,” “The Squid and the Whale”) starts us off easy with an absurdist comedy, set in Midwestern college town, where Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) heads the department of Hitler studies and joins his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), in raising their lively brood of four.

DeLillo's fiction, long thought unfilmable due to its literary themes and digressions, leaves Baumbach intellectually bloody but proudly unbowed.

In short, the movie doesn’t work as a whole, but there’s no denying the glints of brilliance that keep us riveted.

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Life is complacent comfort for the Gladney’s and their kids, a baby of their own and three from other marriages -- Babette’s daughter, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and Jack’s son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and daughter, Steffie (May Nivola). The last two are the gifted offspring of actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer.

Jack isn’t even bothered when his professor pal, Manny (a terrific Don Cheadle), who develops a class out of old movie car crashes, counters Jack’s career-making course on Hitler with his own lectures on Elvis.

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The academic spoofing ends when everyone takes to the road, evacuating in panic from an “airborne toxic event” that just might signal the end of days.

Though the film, like the book, stays rooted in the 1980s (no cellphones!), there’s a timely connection to COVID-19 intensified by the fact that the film was shot during the pandemic.

Kudos to Baumbach’s vibrant cast for deepening characters who are little more than DeLillo mouthpieces in the book. As the pill-popping Babette, Gerwig makes something palpable and moving of thwarted ambition. And Driver, displaying a paunch and slumping posture, remains an actor of limitless range who actually brings flesh and spirit to an academic concept.

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Still, Baumbach’s honorable faithfulness to the novel that won DeLillo the National Book Award leaves his movie struggling between two mediums. When it comes to deconstructing existential dread, cinema is no match for the fullness of the page. At least it isn’t here.

“White Noise” plays like a Baumbach collaboration with DeLillo, a sign of respect to a virtuoso. And I don’t mean this as a compliment. It’s Baumbach’s first constricted film, the one that never completely breaks free.

Except, of all places, in the end credits.

Unfolding in a supermarket where customers -- on a contact high from shelves overstuffed with brightly colored brand name junk food -- break into a song and dance sparked by “New Body Rhumba,” a fresh anthem from LCD Soundsystem.

The sequence is a blast and the scariest thing I’ve seen on film since George Romero set zombies loose at a shopping mall in 1978’s “Dawn of the Dead.” It’s also Baumbach breaking free of DeLillo to make his own kind of apocalyptic poetry. “White Noise,” which goes flooey more often than it hits the mark, needed more of that.

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White Noise review: Noah Baumbach’s apocalyptic new movie may be the most American film ever made

The adaptation about an “airborne toxic event” has plenty to say about death, family, and our addiction to spectacle.

Don’t fear the reaper

“Television does a lot of our predatory human research for us,” David Foster Wallace wrote in his 1993 essay on the impact of television and irony on U.S. culture. “American human beings are a slippery and protean bunch.”

His contemporary, Don DeLillo, also explored this notion in White Noise , a novel that guides us through a rag-tag family’s involvement in academic absurdism, narcotic intrigue, and what happens when the nuclear family is actually exposed to something nuclear. In both the 1985 novel and director Noah Baumbach’s new adaptation, White Noise explores how — or, more accurately, if — we can navigate a world in which Americans are kept culturally and pharmaceutically serene by a series of real and metaphorical medications, amid a constant onslaught of disaster, spectacle, and death.

Even for Baumbach, White Noise is dark, but it’s also one of his funniest movies in years and perhaps his best attempt yet to capture the essence of modern America.

Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver star as Babette and Jack Gladney, both each other’s fourth spouse. He is a pre-eminent scholar of Hitler Studies and Advanced Nazism at the local university. She is a corkscrew-curled teacher of posture at the local church. The Gladney brood typifies the cacophony of American life: their shared children include Denise (Raffey Cassidy), who reads medical journals for fun; the suspicious and sensitive Steffie; toddler Wilder; and Heinrich (Sam Nivola), a precocious teen who can reel off reams of information like a sentient search engine.

In their overlapping conversations laden with half-truths and folksy speculations, Jack tells us with a good deal of warmth: “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.” But between chaotic mealtimes and communal television-watching (the preferred family choice is newsreels of plane crashes as opposed to sitcoms), it’s clear that Babette is hiding a secret from her husband and eagle-eyed daughter concerning an off-the-market medication known as Dylar. Naturally, before they can get to the bottom of it, the entire town is thrown into chaos as an “airborne toxic event” forces them to flee their homes.

A good deal of the film takes place in a chemically colorful supermarket — which we’re told is a “sacred place” full of “psychic data” — filmed in Rubix-cube primary colors by cinematographer Lol Crawley. The supermarket itself personifies the titular white noise Baumbach is exploring here, with endless consumer products and artificially lit aisles lending a plastic unreality to proceedings. Paired with a 35mm anamorphic lens and era-specific products, this visual time capsule is ripe for latent, tongue-in-cheek cultural analysis.

Sam Nivola as Heinrich, Adam Driver as Jack, May Nivola as Steffie, Greta Gerwig as Babette, Dean Moore/Henry Moore as Wilder, and Raffey Cassidy as Denise in White Noise .

Perhaps this sort of high-concept plot seems ill-suited to hyper-naturalist Noah Baumbach, but his experience in unpicking and re-sewing the family unit in previous features like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story give the director an entry point into DeLillo’s occasionally distancing novel. While satirical, there’s no smarm here; Baumbach imbues a typical warmth and reality into his characters, whom you care about and actually want to succeed.

This is achieved, in part, thanks to the film’s pacing and patience; there’s no rush to take us to the next toxic explosion or big monologue, but a pleasing focus on characterization. In her first on-screen acting role in six years, Gerwig imbues a heft and pathos to her character who, in the hands of a less capable actor, might have come across as impenetrably kooky. Elsewhere, characters from “living icons” academic Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) to eccentric drug dealer Mr. Gray (Lars Eidinger) instill a real sense of charisma and memorability to the film’s supporting cast.

A blend of orchestral and electronic music in Danny Elfman’s score represents this shifting approach to satire, irony, and empathy. We’re able to laugh at parodic dialogue paired with pointedly ‘80s sound cues, but also are moved by the film’s slower scenes, designed to draw out deep sentiment. A new song by LCD Soundsystem plays during the credits’ supermarket dance sequence — a surreal closing that manifests the infectious desire to move your body in response to the sounds, colors, and stimuli of your controlled environment.

Don Cheadle and Adam Driver in White Noise .

Despite a clearly demarcated tri-pronged structure — “Waves and Radiation,” “The Airborne Toxic Event,” and “Dylarama” — some may criticize White Noise ’s shifting tonal balances. The film has a habit of presenting the viewer with anachronistic scenes and then abandoning them for new ones. Some viewers may question why the central toxic event ends up being more of a MacGuffin than something the plot legitimately hinges upon.

But Nope is not the only movie from this year that has posited disaster as a somewhat uniquely American spectacle — or that comments on the way our brains are becoming increasingly hardwired to pick up and discard thoughts in the space of seconds. White Noise acutely understands how our prophylactic response to real or imagined disaster is in constant, inextricable conversation with shifting cultural structures designed to keep us dumb and drooling.

As “fragile creatures surrounded by hostile facts,” the Gladney clan could be any normal family forced to reckon with the plastic underbelly of suburban America, where domesticity naturally caves in to chaos. Baumbach has pulled off a skilled balancing game here: making us laugh at the nonsensical points of view eschewed in conversations between characters, while also letting us chew on the idea of our own agency and mortality in a world where we’re all doomed to die.

White Noise will hit theaters on November 25 and Netflix on December 30.

This article was originally published on Aug. 31, 2022

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The Unlikable Souls of “Glass Onion”

The big difference between “ Knives Out ” (2019) and its sequel, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” is one of climate change. In many respects, the two movies are twins. Both are directed by Rian Johnson; both star Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the sybaritic sleuth; and both present Blanc with a puzzle to solve. The first film was centered on a Massachusetts mansion, amid the rustle of autumn leaves, whereas the new one largely unfolds on a Greek island, in charring heat. The downside is a lack of shadows—a bummer for anyone who believes that murder is most foul, and most gratifying, when draped in gloom. The upside is that we get to see Craig, who rose from the waves like a dripping god in “Casino Royale” (2006), step gingerly into a swimming pool wearing a two-piece bathing costume, in striped seersucker, that even the shyest Victorian gent would have deemed too modest by half. Oh, and a buttercup-yellow cravat, knotted and spotted. Nice.

Nattier still is the scene in which Blanc lounges in his bath, crowned with a tasselled smoking cap, sucking on a cigar, and bored out of his giant mind. “I need a great case,” he says. And here it comes. He is summoned to the island in the sun; other invitations, each cached within a cunning box, are sent to his fellow-guests. From the top: Duke (Dave Bautista), who has found fame, if you can call it that, on YouTube, and his inamorata, Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); Claire (Kathryn Hahn), the flustered governor of Connecticut; Birdie (Kate Hudson), once a model, now an entrepreneur, always a fool, plus her assistant, Peg (Jessica Henwick); a scientist named Lionel (Leslie Odom, Jr.); and, to general consternation, Cassandra Brand (Janelle Monáe). Their host is Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a reclusive billionaire who used to be Cassandra’s business partner before casting her adrift. Reputedly, Miles is a master of new technologies. Demonstrably, he is a dick.

The opening twist, in the pretzel of a plot, is that Miles lures these folk to his domain and dares them to unpick “the mystery of my murder.” One obvious model here is Agatha Christie’s “ A Murder Is Announced ,” published in 1950. In both instances, an apparently lighthearted game morphs into a crime with no heart at all; those familiar with the book, indeed, will have a head start in identifying the slayer in the film. Where Johnson scores over Christie is in the whiplash of his storytelling. We get flashbacks, switchbacks, a darting shoal of red herrings, and scenes whose meaning is upended when viewed from another angle, with fresh information at our command. As Whiskey pours herself all over Miles, say, does she know that Duke is watching through the window? Does he know if she knows?

The title swings two ways. First, toward a track on the White Album, in which fans who read too much into Beatles lyrics are waggishly ribbed by John Lennon. “The walrus was Paul,” he sings. Only by such obsessive detail-sniffing, of course, can you hope to decode a movie like this one. Second, there is an actual glass onion: a stately dome, sitting atop Miles’s island lair, and a telling symbol, I would say, for this extravagant but none too sturdy film. It is shiny with mischief, crafted with guile, and performed with eager wit—not least by Kate Hudson, who turns the tweeting Birdie into the empress of faux pas. (On “Oprah,” we learn, Birdie compared herself to Harriet Tubman; she also thinks that sweatshops are where sweatpants are made.) Why, then, should the whole enterprise feel so curiously thin and cold to the touch?

The clue lies in Agatha Christie. Her gang of suspects, in “A Murder Is Announced,” was a mixture of young and old—as it was in “Knives Out,” which was thoroughly warmed by the friendship, fond and non-creepy, between an elderly author (Christopher Plummer) and his nurse (Ana de Armas). No such good will exists in “Glass Onion,” which is stiff with unlikable souls, all of them Miles’s pals, and thus of the same generation. Frankly, who cares who assassinates whom? Also, in the novel, as Miss Marple observes, “nobody knows any more who anyone is.” In the messy wake of war, one could forge not only a new identity but a fictitious past. That covering of tracks isn’t so easy in the digital age, and you can sense Johnson bending the evidence to fit the tale. At one point, somebody is killed before he or she can share a fact that just popped up on Google Alerts. What a way to go.

As for the climax, I will reveal only that it involves major mayhem. In line with“Parasite” (2019) and this year’s “Triangle of Sadness,” “Glass Onion” is bent on smashing the wealthy, together with all their toys—which, coming from a star-stuffed Hollywood spectacle, on a plump budget, strikes me as a bit rich. I wonder what Daniel Craig makes of it all. He clearly relishes the languid brain work, and savors the character of Blanc as if it were ripe Brie, yet here he is, with everything exploding in fireballs. Isn’t that what he was running away from, when he fled the world of Bond?

Tall and black-gowned, with a paunch and a pair of blue-tinted spectacles, Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) is the chairman—and the proud founder—of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill, a pleasant cradle of learning. And here’s the fun part: Jack doesn’t speak German. He tries, but he just can’t get his all-engulfing American mouth around the Teutonic tongue. This frustrated figure, inclined to be hopeful yet pestered by intimations of doom, and brought to life by the tireless Driver, is the hero of “White Noise,” written and directed by Noah Baumbach .

The movie is based on Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name, from 1984, and is set in that decade. (Hands up: who is instinctively on the side of any film that is smartphone free?) As so often with Baumbach, we are ushered into the bosom of a family. This bosom is busier than most, because Jack and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), not only have a child of their own but also house kids from their previous marriages; two of the siblings, Steffie and Heinrich, are played by a real-life sister and brother, May and Sam Nivola, thus adding to the lived-in domestic texture of the story. If, like me, you enjoy watching smoothly choreographed sequences of people weaving in and out of rooms, chattering and snacking, or rallying one another to the TV (“Hurry up, plane-crash footage!”), then the everyday crackle and hum of “White Noise” will be enough.

But this is DeLillo, so we must brace ourselves for narratives—or, at any rate, for occurrences that are so dense with the gaseous air of conspiracy that you can barely breathe. Hence the pills that Babette takes, in secret, or the “Airborne Toxic Event” that shrouds the landscape and causes the townsfolk, including the Gladneys, to evacuate. Baumbach, too, is taking flight, away from his regular zones of operation and into Spielberg country, where the highways seize up in mass panic, beneath a storm cloud as loomingly vast as a spaceship. And, all the while, everyone converses in fluent DeLillo: “Maybe there’s no death as we know it, just documents changing hands.” What husband has ever said that to his wife? On the page, the fact that the characters sound like the author somehow deepens the ominous charm of the spell that he casts. Onscreen, it’s too weird for words.

Nevertheless, even if you grow impatient with “White Noise”—an intimate black comedy that dreams of becoming an epic—stick with it, for the sake of the end credits. Unfolding in wide shot, against the background of a seething supermarket, like an Andreas Gursky photograph, these are a miniature masterpiece unto themselves. Given the chance, Baumbach can’t help making a song and dance of things. Someone please put him in charge of a musical, and soon.

There is more than one son in “The Son.” The first son we see, at the start of Florian Zeller ’s new film, is a baby named Theo. He is doted upon by his mother, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and his father, Peter (Hugh Jackman), who live comfortably in New York. Discomfort arrives at the door, in the shape of the anxiety-shredded Kate (Laura Dern). She is Peter’s ex-wife, and she brings news of their son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who is seventeen. “He scares me, O.K.?” Kate says.

Nicholas is hardly the spawn of Satan. He seems a mild and dreamy boy; his gaze is misted over, as if his mind were drifting elsewhere, and it’s no surprise to learn that he has been skipping school. What did he do all day? “I walked.” And what’s his problem? “It’s life. It’s weighing me down.” The simplicity of these replies exasperates his father, a lawyer with political ambitions. (Not that the film is remotely interested in work; it’s merely an arena for private pain.) Peter’s response to the revelation that Nicholas has been self-harming is typical. “I forbid you to do this,” he says. That should do the trick.

Nicholas, who has hitherto lived with Kate, moves in with Peter and Beth, and appears—though only appears—to be on the mend. He is loved by those around him, and yet, as a doctor says, “Love will not be enough.” Advice that chills the heart. Many viewers, with experience of mental-health crises in their own homes, may decide that the plot of this movie cuts all too close to the bone. (Few of them will be wealthy professional New Yorkers with ready access to psychiatric care.) If “The Son” lacks the grip of Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” (2020), it’s because the fable of Nicholas and Peter has the brittle feel of a setup. Over and over, as situations are constructed, you can spot the payoff coming; when Peter dances with Beth, in their apartment, do we get a shot of Nicholas looking on, shut out from others’ pleasure? Check. Likewise, the finale relies on a detail that’s been planted, with maximum implausibility, a while before. The shock is blunted on impact.

This is not to scorn the skill of the actors, and Dern is on especially wrenching form. It is neither fair nor wise, however, to land Jackman with a role of ceaseless anguish, which, dancing aside, siphons off his natural geniality. The irony is that “The Son” is unceremoniously stolen by Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar as a man felled by dementia in “The Father.” He now plays Peter’s father, a power-monger with his wits intact and blazing, who, in a single scene, proceeds to torch the fragile emotional sympathies on which the whole film depends. His recommended cure for the suffering of his son and his grandson is as follows: “Just fucking get over it.” Is that not a monstrous thing to say? It is. Does the monster stay in your head, as the rest of the movie recedes? Completely. ♦

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Summary White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo.

Directed By : Noah Baumbach

Written By : Noah Baumbach, Don DeLillo

White Noise

Adam Driver

Greta gerwig, don cheadle, madison gaughan, college on the hill, douglas brodax, carly brodax, jill brodax, wickham bermingham, michael william chopra, santu chopra, danielle williams, mathew williams, raffey cassidy, henry moore, jacob weinheimer, student in jack's class, danny wolohan, german teacher, randall l. johnson, boarding house tenant, critic reviews.

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10 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

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By The New York Times

Critic’s Pick

Sweet without the schmaltz.

‘Between the Temples’

Ben (Jason Schwartzman), a cantor at a local synagogue who is grieving the loss of his wife, reconnects with his former music teacher in this touching dramedy directed by Nathan Silver.

From our review:

Silver is a sharp, cleareyed observer of human nature, and while he pokes at his characters, including Ben, it’s more teasing than cruel. If there’s a mean joke in “Between the Temples,” I missed it, which helps explain where Silver is coming from. He and Schwartzman make Ben’s pain palpable without sentimentalizing it; you see the hurt in the sag of Ben’s shoulders and in the melancholy that clouds his eyes. Yet there’s a fundamental resilience to the character who, while he’s sometimes off on his own, is never really alone.

In theaters. Read the full review .

Bites off more commentary than it can chew.

‘blink twice’.

After Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat) accept an invite to the private island of a tech billionaire (Channing Tatum), they discover an unexpected cost to their free vacation.

To land its horror-stained commentary on sexual assault and cancel culture as well as class and race, it would need a director capable of pushing beyond basic social politics. In her debut feature, Zoë Kravitz is not that director. Rather her film, for which she also wrote the screenplay with E.T. Feigenbaum, exists more as a concept than a complete idea.

Resurrected but better off dead.

Directed by Rupert Sanders, this new adaptation of the comic book series about a grief-stricken, supernatural vigilante tries to escape the shadow cast by the cult-classic film adaptation from 1994.

“Do you think angsty teens would build shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA Twigs) asks Eric (Bill Skarsgard) about their love story … but the real punchline is that the film itself is the embodiment of that kind of hollow caricaturization and emo teen worship, throwing vague echoes of Batman’s Joker villain, “John Wick,” and 2005’s “Constantine” into a laundry machine and hoping faded shades of black eyeliner remain.

A missing actor, a ponderous film.

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