White Noise

Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André Benjamin, Sam Gold, Lars Eidinger, Barbara Sukowa, Francis Jue, Gideon Glick, Chloe Fineman, Kenneth Lonergan
Running Time: 136 min.
Rating: R

**The Following Review Contains Major Plot Spoilers For 'White Noise'**

★★★★ (out of ★★★★)

When certain novels are deemed "unadaptable" it's often due to the widespread fear it'll inevitably fail for not being the book. In other words, any filmmaker who knows what's good for them should just stay away. That feeling has long circled Don DeLillo's postmodern classic, White Noise. For decades, no filmmaker has dared to take on this existential apocalyptic satire set in a small college town in the mid 80's shaken by an air contamination disaster, and it's easy to see why. But now Noah Baumbach gives it a shot, resulting in what's easily the most ambitious, polarizing entry in his filmography, which isn't a surprise considering the monster he's attempting to wrangle.

Since the story's core crisis serves as the ultimate metaphor for pandemic times, you'd assume that's what finally brought this to the screen after thirty years of false starts. Of course, that the crisis taking place here lacks the same worldwide reach and impact is almost beside the point. In capturing the novel's essence and sense of impending doom, Baumbach is less interested in exploring the event itself than the true ramifications for those directly affected by it. You can feel that tension building before it occurs, often in darkly humorous ways that were prescient when the book was published, but seem even more alarmingly on target now. 

Tackling and spoofing consumerism, misinformation, higher education, religion and healthcare, it's both humorously touching and deadly serious. Much of it rests on Adam Driver's lead performance, which defies description and surpasses anything he's previously done on screen. It's also the best looking film Baumbach's directed, with cinematography and production values uncommon for Netflix's features, most of which tend to all look and sound the same. And after immersing viewers in its eccentric world for the entirety of its running length, it closes with a brilliantly out-of-left field musical number that reaches unmatched creative heights in its final thrilling minutes.

It's 1984 and Jack Gladney (Driver) is a professor of "Hitler Studies" at the College-on-the-Hill in Ohio. Together with his fourth wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), they share four children; Heinrich (Sam Nivola), Steffie (May Nivola), and Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and their youngest, Wilder (Henry and Dean Moore). As Jack secretly taking German lessons to prepare for an upcoming conference, he's approached by a concerned Denise about Babette's increasingly bizarre behavior and memory issues. The discovery of her mom's mysterious pill bottle for an unlisted drug called Dylar only causes additional worry. 

When a nearby train accident spreads a giant cloud of chemical waste over town, causing an "Airborne Toxic Event," Jack scrambles to keep his family safe during a mass evacuation. As he and Babette are now forced to confront their mutual fear of death head-on, the disaster leaves a lingering impact on her already deteriorating mental and emotional state. Suddenly faced with the prospect of his own worsening health, Jack's becomes determined to get to the bottom of his wife's drug dependency, regardless of the dark road it takes them down. 

An opening scene where Jack's colleague, Professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) gives a lecture on cinematic car crashes (complete with a highlight reel of famous film collisions) sets the tone early. He's clearly enamored by all the work and innovation that went into staging these, optimistically seeing beauty in destruction. Conversely, Jack's more entranced watching neighborhood cars orderly line the streets at the start of the college semester, babbling on about it to Babette. It's predictable comfort for him before their lives are upended, interrupting the daily routine he's established to distract himself from the inevitable. And yet for a man so terrified of dying, he sure goes out of his way to surround himself with it, even while clarifying he's not interested in talking about the one thing he's constantly talking about. It's not a coincidence he describes Hitler as "larger than death," giving us a major inkling as to why he felt compelled to create this field of study in which he's the leading expert. 

Before the incident occurs, death's specter hovers over everyone despite the routines they engage in to tune out those fears. The local A&P supermarket is established as the town's communal safety net, a brightly colored temple where they can preserve a seemingly idyllic existence, free from contemplating their own mortality. But a distraction is all it is, or a rather a postponement, until the illusion of their ordinarily comfortable lives is turned upside down by the toxic spill. Initially, Jack brushes off the danger, mostly because it represents his worst nightmare and what he's jumped through hoops to avoid acknowledging. The fear is most evident in Jack and Babette's weirdly unsettling conversation about which of them should die first

The Gladneys fleeing the hovering cloud of toxins while attempting to avoid exposure eventually leads to a car chase and quarantine, luring us into thinking this will be a sci-fi thriller. But it's just a red herring, as they soon discover no one really knows what's happening or will, the truth buried under mountains of medical misinformation and bureaucratic incompetence. The immanent danger ends as quickly as it began, leaving in its aftermath a couple who must now learn to somehow function again after staring death in the face. 

Jack's own potential exposure becomes a ticking time bomb that psychologically cripples him, as does his obsession in uncovering the source of Babette's Dylar. Once he knows, things gets even worse, as they're set on a surrealistic path involving this shadowy organization and a wacky, off-the-wall drug supplier named "Mr. Gray" (Lars Eidinger), culminating in a bizarre but strangely life-affirming visit with German atheist nuns. Besides Baumbach's ability to seamlessly switch tones at the film's midway point, it's really Driver's enigmatic performance that helps make all of this so compelling to watch. 

Nearly unrecognizable with a middle-aged paunch and disheveled appearance, Driver conveys a myriad of dimensions to a secretly troubled man whose entire life revolves around his denial of reality. How Driver emphasizes certain words, uses hand gestures or even moves around a room is fascinating, as he takes full command of every scene with a strange, unhinged charisma. He's also perfected a droll, dry line delivery that functions as the ideal vessel for the darkly satiric worldview the source material requires.

Driver's best moment comes opposite Cheadle's Murray, who's attempting to replicate the niche success of Jack's Hitler course, but with Elvis as his subject. As the two professors circle each other, trading historical commonalities about their famous figures' childhoods, the camera swoops around the lecture room following them, creating this uncomfortable atmospheric tension we can read on the transfixed faces of their audience. When Jack completely takes over like a mad preacher, Baumbach cuts between these prophetic rantings and the train disaster, resulting in what's easily the most impressive directorial work of his career. At least until the film's euphoric ending.

As Babette, Greta Gerwig comfortably slides right back into a big co-starring role on the heels of her successful directorial run. Sporting a fantastically frizzy mane of 80's hair noteworthy enough for even the characters to discuss, she brings a benevolent quirkiness to this optimistic free spirit slowly crippling under the weight of festering depression and anxiety. There's an offbeat sincerity to Gerwig that definitely suits Babette, who's racked with guilt, straining to maintain a happy facade as she sinks deeper into her own hole.

In addition to Cheadle's fairly prominent and effective supporting turn as Murray, Jodie Turner-Smith plays reserved brainiac Winnie Richards, the college's neurochemist who helps Jack in his quest to uncover the origins of Dylar. André Benjamin also has a small role as Elliot Lasher, another colleague at the school. Neither are given much, at least until you arrive at the spectacular musical finale, which you'd have a tough time envisioning without them prominently featured. In a monster adaptation like this, there almost isn't room for sub-plots so everyone surrounding the Gladneys are primarily present to reflect the mindset of the town before and after this catastrophe hits. And given the story's enormous scope, that's understandable. 

Whatever Netflix spent on this was worth every penny, as production designer Jess Gonchor and cinematographer Lol Crawley not only replicate the look, tone, and feel of the period, but movies made during it, to the point you'd think this was actually shot in the mid 80's. Danny Elfman's synthesized throwback score fits right in, only enhancing that aesthetic. Even the smallest set and costume details  astound, but it's the transfixing A&P supermarket dance scene (choreographed by David Neumann) set to LCD Soundsystem's "New Body Rhumba" that gives the film its triumphant send-off, with customers dancing in unison down brightly colored aisles adorned with pyramids of meticulously organized retro labels and boxes. 

For the Gladneys, this shopping trip allows them to bask in the mundanity of everyday life that Babette previously said she wished could last forever. We know it can't and won't, but the irony that they're still out there buying stuff to numb the pain and lose themselves isn't lost. It begins where it ends. Same as it ever was. And Baumbach keeps our eyes glued to the supermarket sequence all the way through, utilizing a visual style and aesthetic that recalls Wes Anderson, but with more narrative and thematic purpose. 

To say White Noise isn't for everyone is an understatement, and that's the thing with bringing challenging literary material like this to the screen. No matter how much critics and audiences initially revile it, the results are rarely forgettable. A robust 136 minutes probably isn't even be enough to delve into all the novel's ideas, but Baumbach still cracks its seemingly impenetrable layers to deliver a thought provoking meditation on the human condition. It's everything an adaptation should be, lingering in your mind long after the final credits roll, perpetually ready for another go-around.