White Noise

 White Noise is Noah Baumbach's 2022 adaptation of Don DeLillo's celebrated and prescient paranoid novel of the same name, published in 1985,  The movie is elaborately produced with a prestige cast, Adam Driver as J.A.K. Gladney, the country's leading Hitler Studies professor, Greta Gerwig as Gladney's troubled wife, and Don Cheadle as the hero's sidekick in academe -- the two men are on the faculty of University on a Hill, an expensive private college somewhere in the middle of the Midwest.  (It's a place like Oberlin or Carleton College in Minnesota).  The filmmaking is a little slack since the script is faithful to DeLillo's book and incorporates as much of its fey, over-inflected dialogue as possible -- modern movie adaptations sometimes are too cautious based on concerns about fidelity to the source (a problem non-existent in Hollywood adaptations of the classic era; the studios basically bought the name of the work adapted and, then, created an entirely new scenario suitable to the stars assigned the project)  DeLillo's dialogue is cunning and wonderful on the page but it doesn't really work in a movie:  the characters always sound like semi-amateur actors onstage in a Community College production and the witty repartee, coming across as a mix of Woody Allen and Oscar Wilde, doesn't really work -- the movie is too realistic for the stylized dialogue that mostly consists of wry non-sequiturs and there are four child actors (the couple have a "hers, his, and ours" blended family) who are also very precocious and talkative, more or less the kiss of death for most movies, White Noise included.  The picture is okay and fairly entertaining, but, of course, one expects more from this material and Netflix' high production values.  

White Noise consists of several narrative strands rather loosely combined.  Gladney, a celebrity professor, is an imposter of sorts -- America's greatest scholar on Hitler, he doesn't speak German and is struggling to learn the language for a big Hitler conference at the College.  An Afro-American professor aims to imitate Gladney's success by instituting "icon studies" with a course on Elvis Presley.  This motivates a showy scene in which Elvis and Hitler are compared as celebrities -- it's amusing but terribly shallow and, of course, today anything approximating praise or, even, tolerance for Hitler would be completely out of bounds.  The mere comparison of Hitler to Elvis would trigger godknowswhat consequences and, so, some aspects of the film (set in the late eighties it seems) are now so dated as to seem incomprehensible.  Gladney is concerned that his wife Babette is taking some kind of unknown, off-the-books medication -- it's called Dylar.  A narrative strand in the film involves Gladney and Babette's teenage daughter solving the enigma of the Dylar pills that Babette takes once every three days and that seem to affect her memory and behavior.  In the middle of the movie an "airborne toxic event" occurs -- a freight train carrying mysterious poisons collides with a propane tanker truck and the air fills with toxins.  Gladney's family is evacuated from their home and gets caught in apocalyptic traffic jams fleeing the plume of poisonous gas.  While pumping fuel in the rain, Gladney is exposed to lethal levels of the toxin and told that he might die in fifteen years from the spilled poisons.  The apocalyptic scenes are fun and directed on a large-scale -- there are car chases, explosions and crashes and groups of people huddling together at Girl Scout camp (with bizarre menacing totem poles) and, then, confined in some sort of abandoned school.  Gladney chasing a group of gun enthusiasts -- Cheadle's character has said the world is comprised of killers and victims and, if you want to survive, you need to be a killer with a gun, or aligned with such people -- ends up crashed in a river, floating downstream and buffeted by big boulders in the current.  The Airborne Toxic Event subsides and things return to normal.  Gladney gives his speech in halting German at the Hitler seminar.  Then, Gladney forces Babette to tell him that she is taking the Dylar to control her overwhelming fear of death.  In fact, she is a test subject in a malign experiment.  Although the Dylar doesn't work very well, it's apparently addicting:  Babette has been trading sex for her cache of pills.  Gladney is outraged and, takes a small pistol given to him by Cheadle's character, searching for the bad guy pharmaceuticals vendor.  He tracks the man to the sleazy motel where his wife sold herself for the pills.  The bad guy, played effectively by Lars Eideninger (imitating Peter Sellers in Lolita) is half-crazed and speaks in nothing but bizarre, disconnected non sequiturs -- in other words, he exemplifies the tendencies in the rest of the film's dialogue.  Babette shows up at the motel too and Gladney ends up shooting the drug dealer.  The drug dealer revives and manages to shoot both Gladney and Babette, wounding them slightly.  At this point, the movie goes completely off-the-rails (as does the novel).  Gladney and Babette find a strange 19th century hospital manned by German nuns.  (The place looks like Civil War field hospital in a church building).  The nuns are completely nihilistic and don't believe in God or heaven or hell, but they make a point of telling Gladney (in German) that one should pretend to believe in an afterlife to make the fear of death bearable.  This exposes DeLillo's theme:  humans labor under an intense fear of death; in fact, this fear of death motivates almost all human activities.  Hitler's fascism was an attempt to channel our individual fear of death into a great massive anonymous death that somehow cancels out fears of individual mortality.  In the movie's scheme, the Nuremberg Rally which exemplifies Hitlerian mass death against individual mortality is opposed by the A & P grocery store, a brightly lit, clean place full of colorful commodities that help us to live (and that counteract our fear of dying).  Of course, the Airborne Toxic Effect epitomizes and brings to the fore, the fear of mortality afflicting the characters.  The meanings in the book are allegorical and forced and the movie can't overcome this defect.  There's a showy LaLa Land dance sequence at the end -- the soundtrack plays the "I Need a New Body Rhumba", a catchy piece of music that sounds like the Talking Heads from their disco period and everyone prances around in the A & P.  This final sequence exemplifies what's wrong with the movie -- the scene is cautiously, almost realistically, staged:  the choreography isn't very good and the dancing is haphazard and amateurish.  If you're going to end with kind of spectacle, you need it to be choreographed by Busby Berkeley  The scenes at the motel are like the episode in Lolita in which Humbert Humbert guns down Quilty -- it's all very droll, disconnected, and not really plausible.  I think you probably should see this movie and make up your own mind -- I thought it was mediocre but interesting enough to recommend.  It's two-hours and 16 minutes long.