Film Review: "White Noise" (2022).

"You can't hear it if it's everywhere" in White Noise. This absurdist comedy-drama film adapted and directed by Noah Baumbach, and based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo. At once hilarious and horrifying, lyrical and absurd, ordinary and apocalyptic, the film dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world.

In late July 2004, Barry Sonnenfeld was set to direct the film adaptation of DeLillo's novel penned by Stephen Schiff. By mid October 2016, Uri Singer acquired the rights to the book and pushed the project into development with Michael Almereyda hired to write and direct the film adaptation. In mid January 2021, it was revealed that Baumbach would be adapting and directing the film for Netflix. By June 2021, Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith, Don Cheadle, and Lars Eidinger were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and wrapped in January 2022. Filming took place throughout California and Ohio under the working title Wheat Germ. In August 2022, Danny Elfman was hired to compose the film's score.

The film stars Driver, Gerwig, Cassidy, Benjamin, Turner-Smith, Cheadle, and Eidinger. Driver, best known as the heartthrob star of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, will surprise many here with his intelligent ease in playing a very different sort of character.

Baumbach has not made a commercial piece of cinema overly concerned with making money here; this is a work of art whose brushstrokes are masterfully crafted, intricate, sometimes distancing, and nothing short of fascinating. Baumbach brilliantly captures DeLillo's take on the absurd amount of conflicts faced Gladney as he and his family are dealing with the end of the world. If you've read DeLillo's source material, as I have, then you have a fairly clear picture of the surreal yet extremely pointed world that DeLillo created on the page. It's exhausting trying to wade through a movie where every statement is delivered like a treatise. The universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world, what does it all mean? In the end it means nothing. The film is exhilarating in two ways. The first is that it offers up the soothing image of a contemporary American family brought to heel by the end of the world. The second is the cast, led by Driver. The film, based on the Don DeLillo novel, is less forthright and substantially less enjoyable, but the same general themes are recognizably in place. Perhaps it's a mutant that can't quite fly, but its stank movements will certainly cause pause for reflection, one that will repel as equally as it may attract. DeLillo's cold, exacting precision and emotionally removed observation may not grab all viewers, but under those perfect surfaces is a raw horror trying to claw out of the denial.

Simon says White Noise receives:

Also, see my review for Marriage Story.