WHITE NOISE

What’s supposed to be a darkly comedic look at mid-eighties America in Baumbach’s hands becomes a woefully unfunny, numbingly talkative, thematically muddled drag.

I have never read the Don DeLillo novel that White Noise is based on but it has been called unfilmable on many occasions. Nevertheless director Noah Baumbach, backed by Netflix money, has now taken a stab at it and he has turned this supposedly unfilmable piece of literature into something nearly unwatchable.

It would take too long to name everything that doesn’t work in this adaptation about a college professor and his family whose lives get turned upside down when a toxic gas cloud threatens their community, but a lot of it comes down to tone and style.

What’s supposed to be a darkly comedic look at mid-eighties America in Baumbach’s hands becomes a woefully unfunny, numbingly talkative, thematically muddled drag that isn’t helped either by the puzzlingly detached and pantomime performances of Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

So even if I have never read White Noise, if someone asks me whether the book or the film is better, I can safely say the book wins out, because it’s unfathomable it could be any worse than this messy movie.

release: 2022

director: Noah Baumbach

starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, André Benjamin