Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is the premiere professor in Hitler Studies, a program which he founded in his ongoing tenure at The College on the Hill.  The patriarch of a blended family with his current wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), his two children from a previous marriage, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and Steffie (May Nivola), Babette’s daughter from her previous marriage, Denise (Raffey Cassidy), and a son of their own, Wilder (Henry and Dean Moore), the Gladney family home is a bustling one, to say the least.  When a railway accident occurs a few miles from town, unleashing a toxic cloud, they must all evacuate, but upon returning home after the crisis, Jack begins to worry about his wife who has been using a strange medicine, Dylar, the likes of which cannot be found in any of the journals to treat an illness which she will not disclose to the family. 

Noah Baumbach returns to Netflix with White Noise, a feature he directed and adapted from Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name.  The absurdist comedy takes a broad swipe at the media, consumerism, reliance on pharmaceuticals, celebrity culture, and public outrage which can all feel like very current issues, even though it is set in the 1980s.  For everything that it is trying to accomplish in its 136-minute runtime, it feels incredibly empty as it cycles through its themes without any real comment on them, settling to just point out what is happening without any real comment of its own.  Satire and social commentary have become very difficult genres to break into in the current landscape because of how quickly things move in real life and how easy it is to plug oneself into the discourse on a Reddit thread, Twitter, or for the exceptionally brave, a news article’s comment section.  Because of this, such films like White Noise need to really work hard to prove themselves and while DeLillo can be praised for writing a novel in 1985 that still highlights many of today’s truths – and likewise, society should be damned for not learning its lessons yet – Baumbach is content to not focus the narrative and push hard into one or two key points and make a stronger message, instead opting to touch upon a host of different topics without any meaningful dissection or interrogation. 

Driver gives a bold performance here as Jack, the Hitler enthusiastic who has the shameful secret of not knowing German, and while he does well in the individual scenes, it seems he is struggling to create a full arc for the character.  He is not alone in this as the entire cast seems to be drowning in the absurdity of it all, but given that everyone looks to him as the patriarch of the family to lead them to safety after the toxic event or to save Babette from her addiction, he becomes that same beacon for audiences who are desperately looking for some guidance in this convoluted narrative.  Driver does get to show off some of his comedic timing here, and while the humor is pretty grating, that is more a fault of Baumbach’s than of the actor who otherwise delivers the jokes with precision walking the line for a character who never fully loses grasp of control while still being in way over his head.   

What makes Driver’s one of the most – if not only – successful performances in this film is that he is able to act as if there is chemistry between him and the other characters, even when there is none.  This is most evident in the scenes between him and Babette; a role that was either horribly written, horribly miss-cast, or rather, some near-fatal combination of the two.  Gerwig brings absolutely nothing to this film, and in what is supposed to be the emotional climax when she reveals her infidelity to Jack, her one-note whining goes on so long that even Driver begins to suffer from it as Baumbach continues his assault on a dead horse all in the name of uncomfortable humor.  Baumbach’s gratuitousness in this moment is just one of many instances where he feels his script is much smarter than it actually is, but surely between penning the script, watching the monitors, and working with editor Matthew Hannam, he should have seen that this scene, role, and honestly script, was not working and desperately needed a restructure from the ground up.  

While Driver is the only one that can thread the needle between the antics of the story, no doubt aided by the fact that White Noise revolves around him, there are some other good performances sprinkled throughout that exist in a vacuum.  Murray (Don Cheadle), a coworker of Jack’s who is looking to be a pioneer of Elvis Studies, acts as a bit of a sounding board for Jack and helps bridge the gap between home and work life.  Jack’s role, however, is much louder than that of Murray, and as such is dwarfed by Driver since almost all of Cheadle’s scenes are shared with Driver.  To Cheadle’s credit, he certainly seems to understand the assignment better than most of the cast and he also has the added benefit of a single arc to follow so the actor can actually work on building a character and a performance.   

The other two standouts are the children, Heinrich and Denise, who also benefit from somewhat more focused arcs than the rest of the cast.  Denise’s growing concern and worry over her mother’s pill addiction, or more so that it seems to be an undocumented medicine, is her driving force and though she is not given much to do in the middle of the film, she is instrumental in setting the stage for the final act.  White Noise remains Jack and Babette’s story, a strange tale of salvaging a marriage, so Denise does not get much in way of a satisfying conclusion of her own that is not shared with the general feeling of contentment of the family back together, but Cassidy’s energy throughout is some of the brightest in the otherwise bleak film; a true feat for a character so steeped in worry.  Heinrich’s moments to shine come in the first half while the family seeks shelter from “the event,” and he quickly begins to keep and share an oral history from the moment the cloud was discovered to their time at the Boy Scout Camp turned refugee camp.  Not only does he fill his monologues with exuberant yet frantic energy, but the back-and-forth banter which he shares with his father as they argue about what the media is saying is happening versus what they are seeing from their window – or otherwise experiencing – is done with impressive cadence.  Stitched together, the rapidly changing developments about what the cloud is – an uncomfortable recollection of the early days of Covid-19 – play out like a soft-punching Wes Anderson sketch, but Nivola is able to get into the necessary rhythm to make it work. 

For audiences confused about how a toxic event ties into experimental drugs and a failing marriage, the answer is, unfortunately, that they hardly intersect except for being shoehorned into an overlong and bloated narrative.  White Noise tells two very distinct stories, and unlike Baumbach’s previous endeavor for Netflix, Marriage Story (2019), which told a single story through two perspectives, this single perspective account of multiple stories does not intersect well at all.  There are a few small beats in the second half that are informed by the events of the accident, but there is not enough in that first hour to justify why the film did not either continue with the disaster arc or nix that entirely and pick up at the addiction arc.  It is possible and probable that the story works much better on the pages of DeLillo’s novel, but as translated to the screen it is an unwieldy and unfocused mess that never achieves the union necessary between plots to make it all feel worthwhile. 

Baumbach’s latest effort, to say it kindly, gets away from him. With his largest budget to date, the locations are impeccably dressed, yet as the film is so quick to agitate, the cutesy use of the green/yellow/red color pattern, while impressive in its prominence, becomes just another annoyance as the Gladney family bustles and bumps into each other while their various breakfast conversations are happening all at once, thusly creating a white noise of their own. The film looks like it should be a campy romp, but it takes itself far too seriously to achieve that balance, and what results is a sniveling pretentious wreck that its creators certainly seem to love, but it offers little value to us, unfortunate outsiders.