Somewhere in the middle of White Noise, Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and their blended film family fly screaming at the camera in their station wagon, as if someone had accidentally smuggled The Shrill Four on the Road into competition at the Venice Film Festival. At least by this point in the new Netflix film White Noise, it’s obvious that this isn’t going to be a slavish adaptation of an acclaimed novel.
Instead, Noah Baumbach is filming Don DeLillo’s 1985 classic for our crisis-ridden, covid-infected, environmental disaster-stricken present. Imagine a better and above all more original Don’t Look Up before, with Star Wars actor Adam Driver instead of Leonardo DiCaprio, a less flat satirical reckoning and on top of that Hitler.
White noise throws a cloud of poison into Adam Driver’s tranquil life
Years ago, Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) discovered a gap in the market at the generically titled College-on-the-Hill: He was the first to found Hitler Studies in the States, teaching courses in “Advanced Nazism” and behaves like an ecstatic TV preacher in his self-absorbed monologues about National Socialist mass frenzy and shepherd dogs. Gladney commodified the catastrophe of the 20th century and it’s paying off.
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Adam Driver in White Noise
His life could hardly be further removed from the horror of Nazi reality: he runs a cozy household with his fourth wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and the four children they have accumulated in the meantime. If it weren’t for a small and a big misfortune, although it is initially uncertain which of them will take on what size: After a freight train accident, a poisonous cloud approaches (sounds bad) and Babette secretly swallows pills (that’s not without).
Absurd ideas and a cloud of poison that would make Roland Emmerich happy
In terms of disaster ranking, the poison cloud takes first place early on. It is huge, flashing, one almost expects that an alien invasion by Roland Emmerich is hiding behind it. Director and writer Noah Baumbach, whose Marriage Story ran in Venice in 2019, savors her size. Horror film and disaster thriller suddenly blend into the satire of consumerist life. Baumbach directs them so effectively that you wish you could see him directing Moonfall 2 or The Conjuring 7. Well, Conjuring 7 maybe not.
Jack initially encounters the cloud as he encounters most things and people: he talks them to pieces with everything that is his Vocabulary for self-deception gives. She won’t slide here, not in this well-heeled area. Disasters, according to his logic, always happen to others.
Next to it, Don’t Look Up looks even flatter and more smug
While Don’t look up between the population, media and politics chose one simple target after the other to spice up his end-time all-round attack, White Noise is a satirical miniature about a family that represents the world on the brink. A family that talks endlessly (and funny) without saying anything.
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The family at their favorite place: the supermarket
In contrast to the Netflix predecessor White Noise dispenses with stupid caricatures with the depth of character of a 280-character tweet. DeLillo’s novel simply offers too much material for that. Two highlights: Don Cheadle, who absorbs the strolling dialogues with relish as Jack’s colleague Murray, and the usual wacky Lars Eidinger. I keep quiet about his role, but, to quote the poet Miley Cyrus, this much can be said: At some point he hits the film like a wrecking ball and then nothing is the same.
So if you like watching satires that preach to the converts and set up obvious targets, you’d be better off with Don’t Look Up. On the other hand, anyone who wants to watch a filmmaker appropriate an author’s inimitable voice, happily translate it into images somewhere between Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg and Baumbach himself, and discreetly update it for the 21st century is better off with white noise.
This Netflix film, as the previous set of boxes shows, is complicated. So complicated that he sometimes gets lost in his ideas. But while he seeks the way out, he offers at least that touching Greta Gerwig, whose Babette suffers the real, the much worse catastrophe. She doesn’t need a poison cloud for that. Being human is enough.