When I first heard about White Noise, I couldn’t help but be excited. Adam Driver is one of my favorite actors in Hollywood at the moment, the premise seemed interesting, and the cast was solid. With Noah Baumbach coming off of Marriage Story (also featuring Adam Driver), it seemed to be a home run opportunity. That’s what makes it so disheartening seeing White Noise strikeout looking with the bases loaded. The promise of the cast and crew was overshadowed by incredibly difficult source material and strange choices from everyone all the way through the film.
White Noise is the story of Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a Hitler Studies college professor, and his family, as they try to navigate a “toxic airborne event” and the ensuing issues surrounding that. As wild a concept as this sounds, I actually felt that the best scenes in this film revolved around the evacuation and the chaos that follows. Unfortunately, this only makes up for a bafflingly small portion of the film itself. The first third of this movie is spent “world-building”, which in reality really just left me even more confused as to what the point of the film even is, On top of that, White Noise doesn’t even mention what should be the main plotline, the toxic airborne event, until over a half hour into the film.
What’s worse is that as soon as the film seemingly finds a direction and finally feels as if it is going somewhere, it completely abandons that plotline and somehow creates a climax out of a minor subplot that really shouldn’t have even existed in the first place. The final 30 minutes are a wild amalgamation of ambitious nonsense that connects in no way to the greater story, and left me feeling wholly unsatisfied having spent 2 hours and 16 minutes of my life watching the film.
It also seemed that throughout the film, everyone from the cast to the crew right down to cinematography were trying to make decisions “against the grain”. It felt like they wanted to push away from the status quo, and frankly this could be credited to the book, however I do not know as I did not read the book at all. However, what I do know is that these choices did not make for a pleasant viewing experience. It seemed, at times, that the film was unsure of what direction to take itself. Was it a college drama? A Neo-Noir mystery? A post-apocalyptic family film? We may never know, as all these half-baked ideas find themselves lumped together into one steaming hot potato of a film.
The worst of all, though, was the line delivery. It was obviously intentionally different and seemingly avante-garde, yet ended up coming through as if the lines were written by aliens, and the delivery was that of two people trying to perform Jedi Mind Tricks on each other. I did, however, find Adam Driver captivating for most of the film, especially in moments without dialogue. He kept me coming back to the film when I wanted oh so desperately to get out.
Final Thoughts
White Noise is not a movie I would watch again. I would even venture as far to say that it is a movie that should never have been made in the first place. It had no real plot or structure and seemed to coast on the name power of their lead actors alone. I have come to expect greater of Noah Baumbach, but this is a clear miss in his wide filmography. A film billed as a comedy that didn’t even have so much as a momentary chuckle or the presence of an intelligent joke, White Noise did in fact live up to its name, in that anyone could watch this and be easily lulled into a deep and peaceful slumber.
