written by Noah Baumbach, based on the novel by Don DeLillo
Following his acclaimed, multiple Academy-Award-nominated divorce drama Marriage Story, writer-director Noah Baumbach brings his audiences a new film, the quirky comedy drama White Noise starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle.
Driver plays college professor Jack Gladney whose life in a small town of Blacksmith, Ohio consists mainly of raising his mixed family of four kids together with his fourth wife Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, and promoting his very specific field of historical study, "Hitler studies" and bonding with his fellow professors, including Murray Siskind (Cheadle) who also wishes to promote an esoteric field of study he has dubbed "Elvis studies." Everyone's lives are momentarily thrown into chaos when a train transporting toxic chemicals collides with a trailer truck and releases black pillar of smoke into the air, prompting a wave of mass hysteria and a subsequent exodus from the town. Things are never quite the same after that as Jack is confronted with his near-crippling fear of death and learns that Babette is addicted to a mysterious drug that no one has ever heard of, a mystery he endeavors to solve.
My only exposure to Noah Baumbach has been limited strictly to his work with Wes Anderson, with whom he wrote or co-wrote scripts, and so far the script that has left the biggest impression on me was his work on the Roald Dahl adaptation The Fantastic Mr. Fox, from which, oddly enough, Baumbach borrows some elements, including a snarky pubescent son and a bizarre dance at a grocery store.
Baumbach's quirky, sometimes surreal dialogue felt at home in that charming stop-motion cartoon which featured A-list actors like George Clooney and Meryl Streep but to my mind, it doesn't quite work in this 80s-set fable and, more often than not, feels a tad pretentious. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig have terrible onscreen chemistry; as the viewer I never got a sense that these characters really meant anything to one another other than when the script told me they did. If anything, Driver has stronger chemistry with his colleague Siskind, who is one of the few bright spots on the film.
Driver himself fortunately, manages to carry the film to its ungainly conclusion. Transformed from his ultra-cut Kylo Ren physique, either through prosthetics or some good old-fashioned goofing off, he convincingly wears his character's middle age like a comfortable suit, even when spouting out some of Baumbach's clunkier, stilted dialogue. Gerwig is far less convincing as Babette; she's supposed to be wrestling with a mid-life crisis but her performance just doesn't sell it. She just feels like a Hollywood type pretending to have a mid-life crisis. The way I see it she's a lot better behind the camera than in front of it.
On the whole Netflix really does deserve kudos for championing films that would otherwise languish in movie theaters. That's how I felt when they released the German-language masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. I don't quite feel that way about this film.
6/10
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