White Noise movie review: Bombastic but bland, Noah Baumbach bites off more than he can chew in bloated Netflix misfire

The source of his paranoia isn’t his embarrassing inability to speak German, but his exposure to toxic rain in the aftermath of a train accident that leaves a venomous cloud over his town. Jack is convinced that he is going to die, as the townsfolk are made to hastily evacuate and go into quarantine at a nearby facility.

The COVID metaphor might have been more effective had Baumbach avoided putting characters in actual masks. But this is the fine line between esotericism and populism that White Noise straddles, somewhat inelegantly, for over two hours. Conversations about drugs and death clash against discussions about the Third Reich and Elvis Presley, all written in a pointedly philosophical tone, much of which has been transported from the novel, which I haven’t read. But those who have will find themselves comparing Baumbach’s interpretation of it to what they had imagined in their minds.

The filmmaker is best known for his quietly amusing comedy dramas about ageing (but not necessarily evolving). Many of those movies have starred Driver and Greta Gerwig, playing versions of Baumbach mainstays — academics and artists, East Coast elites who wear their entitlement as a curse. In White Noise, Jack appears to be an extension of this archetype — a professor so committed to making good use of his intellect, he decides to fill a gap in the market that was probably left there deliberately. He teaches Hitler not because he wants to enlighten his students about the cyclical nature of these things — “When people are helpless and scared they’re drawn to magical, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom,” he says in one of his lectures — but because he probably discovered that having nobody to compete with increases his chances of ‘winning’. Winning what, even he doesn’t know.

Gerwig, on the other hand, is robbed of her natural playfulness as Jack’s literally anaesthetised fourth wife Babette, a woman who appears to have looked death in the eye and started scrambling for solutions much before the noxious spill put her husband and others around them in a similar existential crisis. As the threat-level after the accident is escalated from ‘feathery plume’ to ‘billowing black cloud’ to the famous ‘airborne toxic event’, as is the absurdist tone of Baumbach’s movie.

This is the biggest canvas that the filmmaker has ever worked with. There were whispers in some circles about the movie’s budget having ballooned to $120 million — a believable (if unproven) story about a director more comfortable on a New York City stoop than working on a Spielbergian scale.

You can feel the movie straining to capture the majesty of the source novel in the scene where Jack and his family flee their home under a literal cloud of fear, and in the garish musical number at the end, set inside a supermarket and scored to an original song by LCD Soundsystem. These scenes are meant to satirise American society’s reliance on consumerism and escapism, but more than any moment in the movie, the one artefact that best represents these values is the movie itself.

It’s an unwieldy object, produced by a giant tech corporation that knows your likes and dislikes better than your own mother, and directed by someone who simply wasn’t satisfied by his position in the ecosystem and felt entitled to a bigger piece of the pie. “An occasional catastrophe doesn’t hurt,” a character says in the film. Baumbach would do well to remember this as he moves on to his next movie.

White Noise
Director – Noah Baumbach
Cast – Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
Rating – 2/5