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Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Noah Baumbach has a special talent for tapping into modern-day anxieties. His previous film with Adam Driver, Marriage Story, chronicles the agonizing last gasps of an unsalvageable marriage. His new film White Noise is a darkly comedic take on a worried world, preoccupied with death, and numbing its anxieties with medication, comfort grocery shopping, and whatever else would reduce the acute pain of living into, well, white noise.
The Netflix film White Noise, adapted from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, follows hotshot college professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) whose absurd course on “advanced Nazism” is hugely popular among students — his success in the academe a balm to middle age and a creeping awareness of death. After all, all the evidence points to eventual doom: his thinning hair, his potbelly, and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) becoming forgetful, possibly a symptom of early dementia or the effect of mysterious pills she is taking. Their intelligent kids are obsessed with plane crash footage on the TV news, indulging in what we would now call doom-scrolling.
Nothing a mindless, blissful trip to the supermarket couldn’t cure, until an actual disaster happens. A drunk truck driver carrying loads of gasoline crashes into a train full of highly toxic chemicals causing an “airborne toxic event” that forces the Gladneys to join an endless line of cars in a mass evacuation.
Jack Gladney, for all his scholarly flamboyance, finds himself hopelessly inept in an actual life-threatening situation and futilely trying to find the precise words: Is the toxic cloud “feathery” or “billowing”? All their catastrophizing could not prepare the Gladneys for the real threat of death.
Editor's Note: This article was last updated on December 27 with the latest trailer.
Related:‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach’s Satire Is Too Busy For Its Own Good | Venice 2022
When and Where Will White Noise Be Released?
White Noise released in select theaters on November 25, 2022, before its streaming release on Netflix on December 30. Finally seeing a release date for White Noise is something of a triumph, considering that filmmakers have been trying to adapt the notoriously “unfilmable” novel for decades. Addams Family director Barry Sonnenfeld optioned the rights to White Noise back in 1999. When the project fell through, Hamlet director Michael Almereyda carried the torch after Uri Singer acquired the rights to the DeLillo novel.
In an interview with Variety, Baumbach says the novel’s reputation for being unadaptable didn’t give him second thoughts.
“This is the first movie I’ve made from a book, so I picked a doozy. From my perspective, this is something that feels to me like the world does right now. This is a way for me to express how I’m feeling about the world right now. It felt like a gift at that time.”
Is There a Trailer for White Noise?
“Life is good, Jack. As long as the children are here, we’re safe,” Babette tells her husband Jack. But the Gladneys are now far from safe. A toxic black cloud literally hangs over them, a man-made ecological disaster that triggers a mass exodus from their small college town where Jack reigned as its most popular professor. Now, the Gladneys are stuck in endless traffic, just one of the hundreds of cars and families fleeing the life-threatening “airborne toxic event”. The Gladney children peer out their car window to observe how other families in adjacent cars are reacting to the mass evacuation. “They don’t look scared in the Crown Victoria,” says one child. “Yeah, they’re laughing,” says another. Only to be rebutted by another, “These guys aren’t laughing in the Country Squire.” When an exasperated Jack asks, “What does it matter what they’re doing in other cars,” his daughter says: “I want to know how scared I should be.” The question best captures the fears and anxieties that are so relatable in current times. Just how scared should we be? Of Covid, climate change, job insecurity, aging, and of course death? “May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan,” Gladney says in the teaser which shows the Gladneys attempting normalcy amid catastrophe. A full-length trailer for the movie was released on November 22 as well, which you can see below:
Who Is in the Cast of White Noise?
Praised by Martin Scorsese as “one of the best, if not the best, actors of his generation,” Adam Driver transforms for White Noise, in which he sports a potbelly and receding hairline to play Jack Gladney, an electrifying professor who absurdly teaches Hitler Studies to his adoring students in the fictional College-on-the-Hill. Jack’s scholarly prowess will prove worthless when real disaster strikes and the life-threatening situation calls for an action hero rather than a somewhat nutty but brilliant professor.
Jack’s wife Babette is played by Greta Gerwig, a loving but neurotic mom who has symptoms of early dementia and is addicted to a mysterious drug called Dylar which she claims are cherry LifeSavers. A health instructor teaching posture to community members, Babette is herself obsessed with death. At home, she and Jack talk about who of the two of them will be the first to die and who will be the most heartbroken.
Their four children (three from previous marriages) are fascinated by death as well, rushing to watch TV news coverage of a plane crash. Sam Nivola plays the analytic teenager Heinrich. May Nivola plays the sensitive younger daughter Steffie. Raffey Cassidy plays the inquisitive Denise, the keenest observer of her mom’s neurotic behavior. Twins Henry and Dean Moore play the youngest son Wilder.
Jack’s colleague Murray Siskind, played by an unforgettable Don Cheadle, teaches a course in pop-cultural iconography and hopes to do for Elvis what Jack has done with Hitler. A big standout set piece has the two men delivering an electrifying joint lecture about Hitler and Elvis.
Related:Existential Dread Has Never Looked Better in New 'White Noise' Posters
Who Are the Creators Behind White Noise?
Writer-Director Noah Baumbach pulls the outsized ideas and performances together, even adding to the already big set pieces a glorious dance sequence in a supermarket — a scene critics invariably praise as a must-watch. White Noise is Baumbach’s third film for Netflix, after The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story both starring Adam Driver.
Baumbach, David Heyman, Uri Singer are the producers of the film. Academy Award Nominated composer Danny Elfman is responsible for the film's score and LCD Soundsystem recorded a new original song for the film titled "new body rhumba." Providing the cinematography for the film is Lol Crawley whose credits include The Devil All the Time and The Humans. Matthew Hannam serves as the film's editor, having prior worked on films like Wildlife, Swiss Army Man, and Enemy. Jess Gonchor is the production designer behind the film, he previously was nominated for Academy Awards for his work on True Grit and Hail, Caesar!.
What Is White Noise About?
The official synopsis reads:
At once hilarious and horrifying, lyrical and absurd, ordinary and apocalyptic, White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world.
