White Noise — Noah Baumbach reworks Don DeLillo as post-Covid satire

Dark clouds rolled in on the first day of the 79th Venice Film Festival both onscreen and off, the usual calm before the flurry of activity interrupted by storms. It was a fitting prelude to opening film White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s canny adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about an “airborne toxic event” that first manifests itself as a black plume over a small community in unspecified America.

That its reported appearance and effects on the local population go through several iterations is typical of a shape-shifting movie that is many things: 1980s-set social parody, portrait of profound existential crisis and the closest we’ve had yet to a serious attempt at post-Covid satire.

At its centre are the Gladneys, both ordinary American family and not. Adam Driver loosens his belt and his usual screen-burning intensity to play paunchy and somewhat schlubby dad Jack, a professor in “Hitler studies” who is hitched happily to the entirely amiable but pharmaceutically assisted Babbette, Greta Gerwig slipping effortlessly into mom jeans, frizzy blonde perm and the role of Reagan-era homemaker. Shared between them are a gaggle of smart-mouthed offspring from various marriages.

If the dialogue at times has the inauthentic ring of highly polished literary fiction, it’s not entirely out of place for a milieu where much is performative: Jack and Babbette read erotica to each other as foreplay; his lectures are theatrical events in which he and Elvis scholar Murray (Don Cheadle) trade factoids to rapturous applause; and much of the kids’ banter has clearly been gleaned from infomercials and encyclopedias. (That one of them is called Heinrich is also proof that Jack is apt to bring his work home with him.)

All of this is safely familiar territory for Baumbach, who has been Woody Allenishly exploring the personal lives of intellectuals and their families ever since his 1995 debut Kicking and Screaming and 2005 breakthrough The Squid and the Whale. When cataclysm strikes here, though, a less expected new mode moves in: the cinematic signature of Spielberg as panicked evacuees gawp in awe at the intruder from above, mimicking their forebears in everything from Close Encounters to War of the Worlds. Alongside them come winking visual references to 1980s screen tropes, Jack’s faux-wood-panelled Chevy station wagon leaping over the camera like Knight Rider’s KITT or Ferris Bueller’s Ferrari. All of this helps thicken the already pungently postmodern broth of DeLillo’s source text, with its frequent interjections from talk radio, advertisements and supermarket tannoys.

It’s a reminder that, even decades before smartphones and social media, we were lamenting the stultifying influences of information overload and obsessive consumerism. After one irate older exile stands up to rant Network-like about the uncaring mainstream media — “Don’t we deserve attention for our suffering? Isn’t fear news?” — you half expect to see someone posting it on TikTok.

In other words, nothing has changed but everything has. Which brings us back to Covid. From shopping aisles to Nuremberg rallies to gridlocked escape routes, this is a film fascinated by the behaviour of crowds and the individuals desperate to separate themselves from them — and from death. It finds ample black comedy in the absurdity of it all, maybe even some comfort. What else is there to do?

In Venice we flock to screening rooms following the latest protocols, some of them already seeming like quaint hangovers from angstier times, grateful that for the moment we have nothing more sinister to grapple with than a dodgy ticket booking system and the occasional downpour. As Jack and Babbette put it: “Sounds like a boring life.”; “I hope it lasts forever.” 

★★★★☆

‘White Noise’ will be in cinemas from November 25 and on Netflix from December 30