Noah Baumbach’s Strengths Aren’t Lost in the Sumptuous White Noise

It’s 1984 in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, an iconic novel that opens on packed cars—foreshadowing a highway that’ll soon be crammed to a stop with evacuating families. But in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s screen adaptation, we begin somewhere else, a little further back, in a classroom submerged in lecture: “Look past the violence!” It’s a call to action from professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) to his students, and an invitation to satirical logic for us, the viewers, students in the art of DeLillian critique and maximalism for the next two hours and sixteen minutes.

This plot, like all plots, “moves deathward,” as founder and professor of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) explains. That’s the nature of all plots, but the phrase applies in excess to White Noise. After a brief spell of normality, an “airborne toxic event” creates a pandemic that hovers ominously in the form of a black cloud over life on Earth, leaving people quarantined and displaced, uprooting the Gladneys’ mild, routine suburban life.

Babette (Greta Gerwig) and Jack have seven kids from past marriages, four of whom they’re still rearing: Wilder, Denise (Raffey Cassidy), Heinrich and Steffie (the latter two played by Sam and May Nivola, children of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer). Baumbach uses a bizarro cast of characters to freshly convey the warmth and comfort that can be found in a partnership or close-knit nuclear family. Take, for instance, one of the many cinematic walks taken, in which the camera cuts between the mechanics of Jack’s endearing motions toward Babette, drawing his hand softly and swiftly from her neck to her lower back before sliding it into her hand like a gun returning to its holster, all of it second nature. And he does it without over-romanticizing the concept of love or family, regularly offering critique without being venomous (“Family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.”).

Guns—and the violence inherent in them—are a huge topic of discourse, often academically discussed as so many things are in White Noise. They kick the film off through a distinctly non-Baumbachian introduction in style—a lecture on the brief history of the weapon, our mass philosophies around it and the violence that stems from it—cut with the zip and punch of a full-fledged action sequence. Historical footage whirs by in a blur of brutality as Murray pounds his lecture into students and the montage unfolds at a breakneck pace, the coming of a new style of Baumbach. At the heart of everything White Noise gets at in regards to the American condition (and the human condition, for that matter) is a searing, darkly comedic look at a nation’s fear of firepower and their somehow stronger intuition to do nothing about it. The only things more American than that are apple pie and Elvis.

White Noise is yet another sign of Elvis fever raging on in 2022, and Baumbach wields it well. Before the airborne toxic event, Murray enlists the help of Jack—his colleague and friend, and a near god in academia—to help him “build an Elvis power base” among the institution’s deciders, as Jack once did for himself for Hitler. Baumbach uses imagery of the king to both accentuate his impact and draw visual parallels between something as strikingly similar (and thought-provoking) as the Hitler heil and the Elvis chop. (The film also includes Elvis’ “Wooden Heart,” perhaps his most peculiar single, a bouncy, congenial German folk track from his time spent in the U.S. army in Germany.)

With White Noise, Baumbach marks his exit from intimate independent film scopes and minimalist aesthetics, in turn triumphantly announcing his entrance into the big, brightly colored world of major studio productions. The studio behind him is the same studio behind his last two films: Netflix, with whom he signed a contract to work exclusively over the next several years. But where their last two, The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story, cost $11.4 million and $18 million respectively, White Noise’s budget is reported to be at least $80 million, possibly having spilled over $100 million, not far from the cumulative cost of his entire filmography up to this point.