2023 Reviews – White Noise

🎵 All that I’m hearing from you, is white noise! 🎵 – The Living End

Yeah ⬆ I had to do that… The Bach-man returns, after a triumphant result with Marriage Story in 2019, and brings his own wife with him again this time, Greta Gerwig, for White Noise. There were some murmurs of award bait surrounding some aspects of this movie, with Adam Driver’s performance nominated for a Golden Globe, so let’s check this movie out on Netflix.

Highly regarded ‘Hitler-ologist’ Prof. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) lives with his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), among the hustle and bustle of four kids in an idyllic 1980s suburban home. Before we can worry for too long that fellow lecturer, Prof. Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), would like Jack’s advice on how he can gain the same notoriety on the topic of Elvis Presley, a truck crashes into a train on the outskirts of town, sending a vicious toxic plume their way, and the Gladney’s must decide how they will react – evacuate immediately, or wait a little while? As this occurs, eldest daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) is already concerned with Babette taking secret little white pills that may have a link to her increasing forgetfulness.

O-kay… I’m glad I had snacks to sink into for this one, to help me endure. White Noise is a dark comedy, but especially around the time the academics at Jack’s university are seriously considering the times they’ve pissed in a sink, my store-bought popcorn helped me get through 😕 I’m sure it’s deliberate, but I think there are a few aspects of this movie’s production that are a little off-kilter, and I struggled to find valid rhyme and reason for them. The dialogue is flat and rushed, as if the movie is pretending to be an amateur stage production, where performers are so proud that they’ve remembered their lines, that they forget to add any emotionality into them to have the scenes seem real. The kitchen setting is very cluttered, and there’s cereal everywhere (!) – when the family are discussing what they know about the airborne toxin, there are at least three cereal boxes across the benches, which, okay, there are six people in the house, and maybe they all like different cereals, and maybe none of them have put their cereals away since breakfast, but it makes the setting look like it’s trying too hard to be familiar, and it’s just weird that I noticed it at all. I think I get the title – ‘white noise’, as the over-pollution of inane nattering, bombarding sensationalism on TV and advertisement, to the point where the family and colleagues cope by talking over each other or tuning out, and where the only phenomena that can bring them back to base is a radical occurrence, like a car crash – but I kept waited for these aforementioned irritating quirks to align, or connect to at an apex, but I don’t think I ever got a handle on what is going on.

After the cloud rolls in, and through the middle of the movie, is the only real entertaining part for me, where the movie reminded me of if National Lampoons had done another ’Vacation movie and the Griswolds had to outrun the apocalypse 👍 The movie is very good at connecting with its absurdist humour here, with the car chase scene, and ‘practice simulation’, making for two of the most enjoyable jokes. Then there’s one line about family being the root of misinformation, and the joke about the kids sharing the binoculars in the backseat while the cloud is most spectacular in the sky, which led me to think that this movie was ultimately going to be about how even in times of calamity, family is still the primary foundation, and it’s important to be there for each other, because in the end, that’s all we have. But, unless the movie is mixing messages, it loses me again down the home straight, having the parental figures so obsessed with death to the point of crisis. If this movie is leaning towards supporting an idea that all the ‘white noise’ exists to quell a constant fear of death, then I think it’s myopic – there are many factors in the living that can stress a person out, and aiding us to succumb to creating or being lost in white noise. It’s true, we are all aware of our mortality, but I don’t understand why these characters are so petrified. I also don’t understand the Hitler and Elvis references, as if to suggest that being a fan of either one of them is of the same delusion 😕 And I don’t know the significance of the colour green either, but I want there to be one, pertaining to Denise’s visor and the flashing lights outside a few times when Babette’s pills are mentioned. I thought we also might find out that this whacky town is a purgatory, explaining much of the little oddities, and perhaps Babette is taking those pills to stop her becoming aware of it. But even if that is the intention, and it still could be, I don’t understand how that fits together with the cloud of black death, the best part of the movie, which seems more like literal plot progression in this seemingly highly metaphoric caper.

Adam Driver gives a pretty good performance – I don’t love it, but it’s remarkedly varied. Don Cheadle might have less scenes than I have fingers on one hand, and I prefer his cold open on car crashes from 2005; many people may consider the Academy Award winning Crash has aged poorly, so I suppose it’s nice for Cheadle to get another try at it, and I wonder if he was headhunted for his experience on the subject 🤣 Cheadle’s character is right about Babette’s hair though – that style is fierce; love it.

For another take, there are plenty of movies out there that make a mockery of movies, or life, having a significant point – the Coen Brothers are experts at it, with The Big Lebowski their most famous example, although I feel this movie is more aligned with A Serious Man. But these examples are still entertaining, and don’t peter out in the final act. Could it be that I didn’t enjoy this movie just because I didn’t understand it, and couldn’t get on the same trolley track? It’s possible. At times, I did wonder if I was underqualified to write about this movie because although I’ve seen Marriage Story and The Meyerowitz Stories, that I really liked and are renowned in their own right, I haven’t seen much of Noah Baumbach’s fledgling work, like The Squid and the Whale, to give me a sense of who this guy was trying to be at his greenest – but, oh well, I’ve done it now and here I am. And as the movie closes, I realised all I can take away from this movie is a depiction of how mundane normal life can be as we wait for death, but all it made me want to do is not waste another second on this movie, and live my mundane life! I had to go grocery shopping after watching White Noise, and I knew there would be no dancing, or brightly nostalgic supermarket shelves, Greta Gerwig wouldn’t be there, but it would be a dandy experience without pretension. My viewing transcript for this movie would read that I couldn’t find my feet in the first act, the second act was enjoyable, but the third act falls off a cliff. I’m tossing up between a 2.0 and a 2.5 for a movie that I don’t plan on watching again, and won’t be surprised if I forget about it pretty soon among the hot award contenders swirling around this month. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, for the talent of the production, even if I think the execution of the concept is quite underdone.

2.5