White Noise review: Adam Driver’s Netflix movie epic arrives just in time

When books are written about Netflix’s grand investment in prestige cinema, Noah Baumbach’s White NoiseThe movie that killed the goose who laid the golden funds may end up being remembered. This is not to say the streaming service will never again fund an auteur’s vanity project — it still hasn’t snagged that Best Picture Oscar, and, spoilers, this film won’t be the one to win it — but it’s unlikely to do it on this scale again. The IrishmanWas more costly, Blonde was more of a disaster, but for sheer hubris, you can’t beat an apocalyptic period adaptation of a supposedly unfilmable literary classic, by a director better known for caustic domestic comedies, with a rumored budget of $140 million. We certainly won’t see the like again — not from Netflix, at any rate.

There’s no better way to end your day than with a bang. This is an adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo book. White noiseIt is an enthralling but bogus, inconsistent, and occasionally enthralling film about 1980s America’s collective psychosis. The movie is actually three films in one. It’s a satire of consumerism and academia followed by an epic, paranoid Spielbergian horror film. It ends up being a bizarre, surreal noir that is reminiscent to the Coen brothers. You would probably be wrong if you tried to guess the one Baumbach does best based upon his past work.

Baumbach’s love for the source novel is obvious. It is a faithful and surprisingly cheerful, but antic adaptation. It misses only a handful of the novel’s beats, while the screenplay, which Baumbach wrote himself, reverently lifts great chunks of DeLillo’s dialogue and prose. The director, despite his fandom, is not a good fit for this book. Baumbach specialises in interpersonal dramedies like Frances HaOr A Story About MarriageWritten, performed and shot in a naturalistic way. DeLillo’s book, however, is arch, stylized, and metaphorical, full of big ideas, big events, and solipsistic characters talking over and through each other.

Wilson Webb/Netflix Photo

The story centers on Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a professor at a pleasantly anonymous heartland university who has pioneered the provocative field of “Hitler studies.” At work, Jack covers up for his lack of actual scholarship (he can’t speak German) and engages in spiraling intellectual discourse with his friend Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), who is thinking of diversifying from car crashes into Elvis Presley. Jack manages his bustling blended family well-humoredly with Babette (Greta Gerwig). The besotted pair compete over which of them is more anxious about dying, but something seems genuinely wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is gathering on the horizon — literally. The Airborne Toxic Event is a deadly cloud that causes panic in the Gladneys.

Baumbach pushes himself far beyond his normal comfort zones by almost everything in this material. (It’s also the first period piece he has attempted, and the heightened, day-glo interpretation of the 1980s in the costuming and production design is one of White noise’s principal pleasures.) Unexpectedly, he rises to the occasion. This is his most visually dense and imaginative film by a long chalk, and he deftly constructs a series of stunning set-pieces: an opening lecture by Don Cheadle’s character, Murray, intercut with archive car-crash footage; an academic duel between Jack and Murray, prowling and pontificating around a lecture theater as they weave the legends of Hitler and Elvis together; Jack’s genuinely spooky night terrors; and a theatrical confrontation between Jack and Babette, late in the movie, as he gets her to finally open up and confess what is wrong. This is a beautifully blocked scene, with Gerwig performing it well.

Although the showy, CGI train crash that precipitates the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t really work — it bluntly literalizes a disaster that, in the book, is all the more ominous for being distant and vague — what follows is an extraordinary, sustained sequence that echoes Spielberg’s masterpiece of collective madness, Third Kind: Close Encounters. Baumbach, a great thriller director, has it all. The scenes of gridlock and automotive carnage under boiling skies have a dreadful charge, while a stop at a deserted gas station has something of the exposed terror of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Baumbach later shows that he is able to mix comedy and action in an amusing station wagon car chase. This could have easily been a Chevy Chase movie set during the time. White noise It is done. Baumbach sometimes seems to be more in tune with DeLillo’s pop culture than DeLillo.

Wilson Webb/Netflix Photo

Oddly for Baumbach, who is usually very generous with his actors, the cast flounders, adrift in the surreal grandiosity of the director’s design and struggling to find the rhythm in his collage of lines from the book. Cheadle, tweedy and quizzical, fares the best in this strange world, delivering statements like, “She has important hair.” Driver has some great moments and characterful bits of business — witness the way he shoves his hand up through his academic gown to push Jack’s tinted glasses up that magnificent nose, with a private smirk — but he’s sadly miscast. At 39, he’s at least a decade too young for Jack, and even the pot belly and patina of seedy middle age given to him by the makeup and costume departments can’t hide his essential virility. You just can’t buy Driver as a thwarted academic; his body doesn’t know what thwarted means. He’s very funny, though. Driver’s intensity often leads his comic skills to be overlooked, so it’s a pleasure to find as unlikely a film as White noiseThey should be brought to the forefront.

The thing that most annoys DeLillo purists about Baumbach’s film might be the thing that makes it most pleasurable to watch for everyone else: It’s fun. It’s a messy movie that can’t quite find the thread to make sense of DeLillo’s vision or the reality of his characters — particularly during its bewildering final third, after the Airborne Toxic Event dissipates and Jack becomes obsessed with Babette’s place in a kind of pharmaceutical conspiracy. However, it is filled with humor and infectious delight. Baumbach is a daredevil who tries to make people laugh and scare them, sometimes with great success. He also splashes bright colors and moves across the screen. DeLillo, his pretentious characters, and Baumbach perform a dance performance in the supermarket aisles. Are Baumbach making an argument or just having fun? It’s the former, which I believe, so more power to Baumbach. He took Netflix’s money and ran.

White noiseAvailable now at Netflix