After screening a film to his students, one character in White Noise jovially informs his audience that ‘There is a wonderful, brimming sense of innocence – and fun’. Unfortunately, Noah Baumbach’s latest feature doesn’t quite warrant the same glowing praises. Based on Don DeLillo’s celebrated novel of the same name, Baumbach regular Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a revered history teacher who witnesses his college take a turn for the worst as it experiences what a title card describes as an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’. Chaos ensues, and his family fall into increasing turmoil as apocalypse approaches.
My current knowledge of the Baumbach cannon is quite limited, with Marriage Story (loved it) and The Dead Don’t Die (not so much) being my only knowledge so far. I’m also not familiar with DeLillo’s postmodern work, whose source material the film has been criticised for sticking to so closely. From what I’ve seen so far from Baumbach’s oeuvre, his whimsical worlds, indie tendencies, eccentric characters and popping visuals mirror the aesthetics of Wes Anderson. And there’s certainly a lot to enjoy on the visual front; Gladney’s kitchen alone is a collage of bright shades, and the supermarket (more on that later) has enough groovy tones going on to make your eyes go square.
Speaking of viewing, White Noise features various screenings of films, mostly showcased by Gladney during lectures, but never really makes any deeper statements of our viewing processes. There are plenty of films out there discussing this subject (Wim Wender’s The State of Things is a decent example, and Nope is a far better one), but Baumbach doesn’t bother to suggest anything more than surface-level observations. The film, in a similar fashion to The Dead Don’t Die, can never quite decide whether it wants to be a quirky comedy or a serious drama. The intimate, drama that made Marriage Story so engaging is hampered here by an overcrowded, poorly characterised ensemble of faces. While directors like Wes Anderson can generally pull off moments of intense drama or pathos by employing them sparingly within a singular section of his films, White Noise flits back and forth between tones so much that it often becomes irritating.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have enjoyable comedic moments though. It’s hard not to appreciate the deadpan humour of Driver’s exasperated father figure as he calmly drives his family through a field of corn onto a road shortly after saving his car from submerging into a river, politely acknowledging a fellow driver for allowing him to join a queue of seemingly endless traffic. He’s also pretty funny during a later scene when he blankly considers a man’s large size in the supermarket (again, more on that later). The film can’t quite meld moments of humour with the abstract themes it tries to convey. At the end of the day though, it’s pretty refreshing to watch something this goofy and experimental in the cookie cutter world of franchises and superhero films.
Onto that supermarket scene, specifically the final one, where characters suddenly burst into song and the sequence becomes a smorgasbord of colour and interpretative dance akin to an elaborate OK GO video. That’s certainly a spectacle to behold. Cinematographer David Neumann, who also worked with Baumbach on Marriage Story, employed a novel process of using vegetables and cereal to help inform movements, with one character invoking a compelling atmosphere with the use of an indiscriminate box of cookies. Overall, it’s an ambitious project that doesn’t quite stick the landing. Clean-up on aisle 2? Perhaps.