White Noise
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Screenplay by Noah Baumbach
Based on White Noise
by Don DeLillo
Produced by Noah Baumbach, David Heyman & Uri Singer
Characters
Adam Driver as Prof. Jack Gladney
Greta Gerwig as Babette Gladney
Don Cheadle as Prof. Murray Siskind
Raffey Cassidy as Denise
Sam Nivola as Heinrich
May Nivola as Steffie
Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards
André Benjamin as Elliot Lasher
Sam Gold as Alfonse
Carlos Jacott as Grappa
Lars Eidinger as Mr. Gray
Bill Camp as Man with TV
Barbara Sukowa as Sister Hermann Marie
Francis Jue as Dr. Lu
Henry and Dean Moore as Wilder
Gideon Glick and Chloe Fineman as Simuvac Technicians
Kenneth Lonergan as Dr. Hookstratten
Cinematography Lol Crawley
Edited by Matthew Hannam
Music by Danny Elfman
Production companies NBGG Pictures, Heyday Films & A24
Distributed by Netflix
White Noise is best described as a horrifying absurdist comedy. If you read Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and like them, this is for you. If Repo Man didn’t confuse and annoy you, and Donnie Darko didn’t give you nightmares about crashing aircraft, then you’ll enjoy White Noise.
Even though the story is told in a fairly linear fashion, it’s just disjointed enough to keep you off balance. We start with a upper middle class family in a Pennsylvania ‘burb. He’s a professor at “College on the Hill” and the nation’s leading authority on Hitler Studies. She’s a self-help coach, effervescent and endlessly optimistic. The children bicker as children do, only the bickering is an odd admixture of the plebian and the profound. The conversations evolve in an oddly self-referential way, similar to the conversations in Heller’s “Something Happened.”
We get a look at Prof. Gladney’s professional life when a fellow professor specializing in Elvis studies begs Gladney to lend his considerable gravitas by gracing a lecture on Elvis’ life. Gladney does so, and the two combine to give a marvelous dissertation on how Hitler and Elvis were in many ways twins.
Then, several miles away, a fuel tanker truck collides with a train towing hundreds of tankers of toxic chemicals. The movie, which has already had an apparently unconnected pastiche on the glory and fun of Hollywood road accidents, outdoes itself in lovingly depicting the wreckage and huge explosion that ensues. The characters, several miles away, quibble over whether the result is a plume, a billowing cloud, or a toxic event. The argument is seemingly settled when they are ordered to evacuate immediately. The chaos and confusion of trying an emergency evacuation of a small city is all too convincing and real. During the evacuation, the professor is exposed to the toxins in a really chilling sequence. You’ll find yourself looking over your shoulder next time you fill up.
The second half of the movie is post-evacuation, and we learn the wife has been the subject of an illegal medical experiment to treat psychological problems—in her case, a pathological fear of death. The tone shifts, to use my earlier parallels, from Repo Man to Donnie Darko.
It’s a bit uneven in places, although at least some of that is deliberate. You’re meant to be kept off balance as you watch this. But it’s both horrifying and hilarious, and the acting, Adam Driver in particular, is first rate.
Now on Netflix.