The first follows Jack Gladney’s (Driver) academic life as head of Hitler Studies and Advanced Nazism at the ‘College on the Hill’ (the location was the suitably bucolic University of Akron, Ohio) against the chaotic but cosy home life that he shares with his loving wife Babette (Gerwig) and four children. The writer-director’s follow-up to the more focused (but also more solemn) Marriage Story pans out across three loosely-connected chapters. In the film’s final third, however, Baumbach’s substantial faithfulness to a novel that becomes a sort of fever dream almost defeats him - and us. But is still has a lot going for it, much of it entertaining - not least the way Driver and Gerwig nuzzle into each other’s deadpan performances with infective gusto. Visually inventive, wryly satirical, White Noise the film leaves viewers to apply DeLillo’s sometimes prescient visions of a morally and physically diseased America to post-pandemic 2022 as they see fit. That’s not something every reader would take from the book, but it allows the writer-director to make a surprisingly good case for the cinematic translation of a work that was long thought to be un-adaptable. Baumbach films White Noise as a 1984 period piece that is also a strange kind of marital love story - one about a distracted man (Adam Driver) who suddenly realises he’s losing the woman he loves (Greta Gerwig). None of those things have gone away and some have mutated into even scarier monsters: so surely Noah Baumbach’s long-awaited film adaptation, which opened the 2022 Venice Film Festival before landing later this year on Netflix, has plenty to say about today?īaumbach’s substantial faithfulness to a novel that becomes a sort of fever dream almost defeats him - and us Narrated by a US professor of Hitler Studies, it took aim at consumerism, pop-culture academia, unreliable information, paranoia, pill-dependency and man’s talent for environmental catastrophe. 136 mins.ĭon DeLillo’s zeitgeist-y postmodern novel White Noise was one of the cultural highs of the mid-1980s.
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