‘White Noise’ - London Film Festival Review
I’m a big fan of Noah Baumbach. His assortment of quirky characters and esoteric, undeniably pretentious, dialogue really captivate me. His films always centre around the dynamics of family in small, character driven narratives. White Noise appears on it’s surface to be a departure from that. For one, it’s the first film Noah has made adapting from source material, as opposed to writing the script himself. But more curiously, Netflix had given him an $80 million dollar budget to adapt a novel with ‘disaster’ elements, which seemed a strange pairing with a director renowned for his indie sensibilities. But while White Noise is much larger in scale, the core of Baumbach’s style remain steadfast.
The lives of Professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their four children are uprooted when a chemical spill from a crashed railway car causes an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’.
Trying to pin down a single description of White Noise proves to be a difficult task. The film is dipping it’s toe into several different genres, and defying any real genre labels in the process. It’s a film that moves in unpredictable ways. Whilst this can make for a slightly uneven tone at points, I found the movies’ spontaneity to be really compelling.
We open with the Gladney family, in a realm that feels very familiar for Baumbach fans. Driver’s ‘Professor of Hitler Studies at The-College-On-The-Hill’ feels like the very natural progression of a Baumbach protagonist, and is the perfect type of character to showcase Driver’s comedic chops as well as his dramatic. He likes his life, yet does so with a healthy dose of self-loathing and paranoia about his own mortality. His wife is supportive of his ‘important’ work. His children are intelligent and morbidly curious beyond their years. All vintage Baumbach. And then, the introduction of the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’ provides a fascinating narratological question. In your typical disaster movie, the protagonist is always some former SAS, action man who has the skills it will take to survive. But what would happen if you took the quirky, eccentric family of a Baumbach indie drama and dropped them headfirst into a crisis scenario? Well, White Noise.
This narrative kick launches the film into new territory, into scenes and set pieces of a scale that we’ve never seen Baumbach direct before. Judging by White Noise, I’m left questioning why not. The 2nd act of the film sees Noah enter a Spielbergian mode. He manages both moments of loud chaos, in an enthralling car escape, and moments of quiet, simmering dread built around the striking imagery of the cloud. Tonally, it feels very much like your family disaster movie of the 80’s and 90’s, but with that thread of Baumbach’s style running through it. It’s exciting and tense and very humours in parts. I certainly didn’t know Baumbach had this kind of filmmaking in him.
Then, the film pivots again. In the aftermath of the event, Jack and Babette are forced to reveal things about themselves that challenge their seemingly idyllic marriage. In scenes that are reminiscent of marital arguments in The Squid and the Whale or Marriage Story, this portion really allows Greta Gerwig to shine, as she peels back the layers of her supposedly happy-go-lucky housewife to reveal new tragic layers to herself. These truths lead the film to switch again, moving into a moodier, noir-ish finale.
As mentioned, these shifts between genre can be quite jarring. But each section is so technically well made and with enough of a though line to keep you hooked throughout. The technical elements of the film are spot on across the board. The production design is really vibrant, and Lol Crawley’s cinematography really helps emphasis the striking colours of the image. Danny Elfman’s score is also a highlight.
White Noise is a fascinating puzzle box of a film. Each time you think you’ve nailed it down, it zig-zags in a bold, exciting direction. The combination of Baumbach’s quirky character drama and large scale disaster movie doesn’t seem an obvious paring, but it really works. A sharp, funny, and touching story about mortality and a families attempts to overcome their fear of it.
White Noise will open in select cinemas on the 25th of November, before releasing on Netflix on the 30th of December 2022