Some would say that Don DeLillo is an unfilmable author. Other people would disagree. David Cronenberg’s attempt at translating Cosmopolis into a thriller was unsuccessful financially, putting a wrench into the decade-long plans of adapting DeLillo’s more beloved, classic novel, White Noise. However, the Covid pandemic changed that and it was none other than Noah Baumbach managed to get Netflix and A24 to co-produce his own version of this genre-bending story.
Set in 1980s suburban America, the story is split into three neat parts, just like the novel. In the first section, viewers are introduced to the lengthy cast of characters, led by Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their four children. Jack is a professor of Hitler studies, with his course widely beloved by the whole College on the Hill where he teaches. However, he is tormented by the fear of death, something he often discusses with his wife, which influences his every choice. This is where the second, eerily prescient part comes into play: an airborne toxic event forces their town to evacuate, and the Gladneys experience the crippling anxiety that comes with an unknown and ever-changing deadly force.
The parallels between the airborne toxic event, the spread of misinformation, and the complete lack of trust in authority compared to qualified individuals and experts with the way the world reacted to Covid-19 and quarantine are obvious, and White Noise is all the better for it. Baumbach takes DeLillo’s novel and recreates virtually all of its key scenes with the same dialogue beats to make a purposefully in-your-face feature, as to make it clear that what audiences lived through is part of a cycle that is only getting worse through social media. In a time of crisis, people need to come together, and family is the cornerstone on which trust and hope are built. Without his family, Jack Gladney would have collapsed into total paralysis, in a similar way to some of the colourful characters that he meets along the way.
Driver is at his comedic best in this, playing a cowardly, highly intuitive yet fear-ridden lecturer. His energy is infectious here, with one of his monologues on how the masses of adoring fans of Elvis Presley are not too different from those of Adolf Hitler’s being a true highlight that brings the house down. Both he and the rest of the cast are terrific in their deadpan delivery of DeLillo’s words, and Baumbach’s potentially obnoxious, quirky style surprisingly benefits the more serious themes of life, death, consumerism, academia, and socially-constructed mania. A terrific opener to the Venice Film Festival, and arguably one of the best films from the New York filmmaker.
