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DIRECTED BY: Noah Baumbach
FEATURING: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle
PLOT: Episodes from the life and times of a suburban upper middle-class family.
COMMENTS: Noah Baumbach is an important figure in contemporary independent American cinema, so much so that Netflix offered him an exclusive contract for several years. Among the filmic seeds that blossomed through this partnership, White Noise is perhaps the most eccentric affair, at least stylistically. But let’s take a closer look to decode its meaning, aesthetic, and whether it can also be called bizarre.
Based on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise is essentially a film about death. The plot centers on a typical suburban nuclear family engulfed in a false sense of security due to their economic and social status. The father, Jack (Adam Driver), is an upstanding member of the academic community, lecturing as a history teacher specializing in the history of Nazism.
The narrative is divided into three segments: the first serves as an introduction, and the other two are (semi-)self-contained episodes. These episodic segments, mimicking different cinematic genres, disrupt the mundanity of everyday life and subvert ideas of normalcy and idealized unity.
Any illusion of everlasting well-being is dispelled through the constant implementation of memento mori techniques. These reminders of human mortality are everywhere, even when the characters choose deliberately to ignore them. At the university where Jack lectures, a co-professor discusses car crashes as a trope in popular culture; existential agonies lurk under the surface, and an everlasting, almost neurotic, yet deeply human, fear of death governs everyone’s actions.
In the second part, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” the sense of danger obtains concrete form. Chaos ensues after a local chemical spill, playing out like a mix of apocalyptic fiction and an action-packed disaster blockbuster. In a playful nod to these cinematic traditions, the events that follow are extravagant, yet express a harsh reality about the fragility of the human condition.
“Dylarama” changes genre and style once again. Now we have a noirish revenge-thriller, implementing common tropes of the genre to tackle psychotic paranoia while also attacking any idealized sense of familial ties. The situations culminate in violent confrontations and a mental breakthrough for our protagonists.
White Noise is playful in the way it constantly reinvents itself. That’s why Adam Driver is an excellent choice for the main role, having tested himself in similarly challenging genre-bending films like Leos Carax‘s Annette from the previous year. White Noise‘s style is almost hysterical, with a rapid, often overlapping flow of dialogue and movement. Add the multicolored decor and two nightmare sequences, and this film surely verges on weird.
Yet it doesn’t fully go there. It is ironic, deconstructive, and deeply existential, for sure, balancing mundanity with a sense of dread, yet finding optimism in the end. It’s an eccentric cinematic experience, and it is a solid recommendation for fans of the unorthodox. For hardcore fans of the weird, though, there are better options out there.
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