'White Noise' movie review: Adam Driver is brilliant in Noah Baumbach's dark comedy

I first read Don DeLillo's 'White Noise', the book that serves as the source material for Noah Baumbach's new eponymous film, as a precocious teen. Having grown up on a diet of plot-heavy fantasy books like 'The Hobbit', this weird, rambling book proved to be too much for yours truly, and I gave it up less than a hundred pages through. I re-read the whole thing a decade or so later, and while I appreciated its layers and themes, it was still difficult to finish. The book, you see, deliberately does not have a plot per se for roughly half its length and the dialogue is fewer lines that people say to each other, and more like philosophical musings of tortured, obsessed minds.

Still, it was fascinating in its portrayal of 1980s America, with its infatuation with technology, media, consumer culture, disasters, and conspiracies. Add the fear of death, a universal theme across all cultures, and you have a potent cocktail of ideas. These themes have only become more relevant with the times, never more so today, when we stand on the verge of 2022's end. And somehow, the reaction of the characters to the central event has eerie parallels to what we in the real world faced during the (still ongoing, mind you) COVID-19 pandemic.

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But I would never have imagined that the book could be distilled into a 2-hour odd movie and still neatly capture the themes and the story, but Baumbach, behind the brilliant and heartbreaking 2019 film on the slow and painful destruction of a marriage 'Marriage Story', has done exactly that.

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig (also Baumbach's wife) are Jack and Babette Gladney, a seemingly loving couple residing in a small but prosperous town. Together they raise a host of children and step-children. Jack is a professor of 'Hitler Studies' at the cutely named College-on-the-Hill. Only, he does not know German, something he would like to keep hidden so as not to give others a chance to others to impugn his expertise in the field.

A fellow professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) studies American culture but wants to specialise in the field of 'Elvis Presley and as he puts it do to the King of Rock and Roll what Gladney did to the führer. One of the film's most entertaining scenes has the two faux-competing over the respective figures in a classroom.

Disaster strikes. A truck crashes into a train carrying some toxic chemical and the result is an explosion that creates a huge monster of a noxious cloud, which then rains. Dubbed 'Airborne Toxic Event', it causes a hurried evacuation and massive traffic jams. Stopping to refuel the car, Jack is exposed to the rain which he is told at their destination, a quarantine camp, may or may not significantly decrease his life expectancy.

Even as this goes on, and Jack's fears of his potentially-forthcoming death mount, he keeps the diagnosis (if it was that) a secret, and he learns that his wife is taking a mysterious pill called Dylar that is not listed in the records. After finding out behind her back, he finally confronts her.

Literary critics who swear by Don DeLillo's tome would disagree, but I would go so far as to say that the film gets across what the novel wished to say more efficiently. There is less rambling and extraneous stuff. You might say the novel was never about the plot, it was about making the reader vicariously feel what its protagonist is feeling. When life is really going, as the plot is, it usually ends, soon. I do enjoy smart self-references in my stories, but I think I understand Baumbach's thought process: it probably would not have translated nicely to the screen. But there is a monologue on the 'plot' in the movie that I believe the book's fans will enjoy.

The film like the novel takes about halfway through to get moving. But in all the philosophy, Baumbach lets his trioDriver, Gerwig, and Cheadle shine. They all are great, and Driver particularly is scarily believable in the role of a man drowning in the fear of mortality. If actors can keep your attention when there is hardly anything happening, keep them close.

I must warn you that 'White Noise' is not everyone's cup of tea. It will not be an easy watch for most of you. It is not an escapist experience, especially not in the post-pandemic world. The world it depicts and the characters it showcases with their strained faces might feel too authentic for comfort. Though it is itself a sort of heightened reality and even a slight parody of our world. But thanks to Baumbach's mostly faithful direction—in spirit, if not in body—and the enduring relevance of the book's themes that are somehow more applicable now than they were in the 1980s, 'White Noise' is demanding and even chaotic, but it is also packed with interesting ideas and ultimately if you have the patience,isa worthwhile watch.