Soon after its publication in 1985, author Don DeLillo’s heady satire of family turmoil, fringe academia and existential angst was ushered into an elite club of novels several critics deemed un-filmable. The labyrinthine plotting, taking in pit-stops to ponder addiction, religious faith and consumer culture, peeled open slowly over close to 400 paperback pages, suggesting any screen adaptation by even the most accomplished director would represent a formidable challenge.
Consequently, lovers of the award-winning book (and there are many) are likely to approach the movie version with extreme caution, fearful of how much narrative or how many characters have been sacrificed to fit a running time of 135 minutes. Would the essence of DeLillo’s themes and theories remain intact in the face of inevitable cinematic short cuts?
The maker of such alluring humour-laced dramas as The Squid And The Whale, Greenberg and Frances Ha, writer and director Noah Baumbach has the credentials to take on the job with confidence and, perhaps more importantly, respect for the nuances of the source material. The result is an engrossing, cerebral black comedy with the capacity to both reassure and wrong-foot the most diehard DeLillo fan in equal measure.
Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) are each on their fourth marriage, in a busy household overrun by misfit offspring they had with previous spouses, like a manic twist on vintage TV sitcom The Brady Bunch. Jack teaches the dubious subject of Hitler studies at the same idyllic suburban college where his friend Murray (Don Cheadle) lectures in Hollywood car crashes, while at home he and Babette wrestle with mortality in sombre conversations about which of them will die first.
Nearby, an audaciously filmed chemical spill triggers what the authorities class an “airborne toxic event”, necessitating a full-scale evacuation of the town that takes the family on a wild ride in their modest station wagon to a makeshift hostel until it’s safe to go outside again. However, questions hang over whether Jack has been infected with something that’ll slowly kill him, and just what’s in those mysterious pills Babette’s popping when her husband and the kids aren’t looking?
Baumbach walks a fine line between serious contemplation and throwaway absurdist asides, examining the dynamics of family and loyalty one minute, then having fun with Jack’s professorial calling of “advanced Nazi-ism” the next. In the latter category, a bravura scene where Jack and Murray mesmerise their students by debating the parallels between Hitler’s and Elvis Presley’s mother fixations is rich in mercurial invention, helped enormously by the director’s strict adherence to the original novel’s dialogue.
It’s a master class of both actors’ skills as persuasive conduits for off-kilter ideas, a mischievous showstopper seemingly disconnected from what might be considered the plot’s main thrust. Disappointingly, though, Cheadle’s other contributions are sparse (compared to the character’s presence in the book), so it’s left to Driver to shoulder the greater burden of guiding viewers along the narrative’s intermittently oblique road map, and he does so with a perfect blend of non-sequitur navel-gazing and unexpected heroism.
Gerwig’s role is less clearly drawn but just as important to understanding the disorienting pivots required of a modern marriage and family life, and she brings heartbreaking depth to Babette’s often indefinable struggles. Dysfunction and devotion walk hand-in-hand in the Gladney homestead, where Raffey Cassidy shines as the pragmatic, wise-beyond-her-years eldest daughter Denise.
“Family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” Jack says at one point, while Babette, with unbearable pathos, muses “We are fragile characters surrounded by hostile facts.” At its heart, White Noise follows the couple’s pursuit of answers both life-affirming and trivial in an intriguingly laconic fashion, where laughter lightly speckles weightier, darker nights of the soul.
White Noise will have a limited theatrical run from Friday 2nd December 2022 before it lands on Netflix on 30th December. Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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