White Noise review — Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s unfilmable novel

Some films are just not meant to be. For almost four decades, Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise has been the one that Hollywood let get away. A sly and brilliant fiction of western anxiety, it always felt like a movie in waiting: simply too inspired to go unadapted. Yet successive attempts never cleared the greenlight. Barry Sonnenfeld, the man behind Men in Black, spent years trying. Others followed, equally ill-fated. By 2020, the New Yorker had published a short story by novelist Emma Cline — simply called “White Noise” — about a film of the book planned to facilitate the comeback of Harvey Weinstein.

But now, in the age of Netflix waving a magic wand over the expensive fancies of brand-name directors, Noah Baumbach delivers. The result is an antic black comedy of campus manners. Welcome to the world of professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), living in American domesticity with yoga-mindful wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and the offspring of this and previous marriages.

At work, Jack pioneers a hip new field: Hitler studies. Outside it, he suffers a gnawing fear of death, even here where material comfort might almost immunise you from it. At a certain income level, Babette muses, maybe dying is “just documents changing hands”.

The novel brims with great lines. Many turn up in the film, sounding exactly like actors quoting Don DeLillo. The Eighties timeframe stays as well. Gladney’s “College-on-the-Hill” still feels like the academic hub of Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”. But Baumbach conjures the era more interestingly than the usual tactic of loading the soundtrack. His signature films (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale) have a tart New Yorkness, cool to the touch. Here he borrows a hint of vintage Spielberg: precocious kids, suburban mayhem.

It makes for a knockabout mood, though one you still imagine will have limited success luring Netflix subscribers from The Crown. Full disclosure: I should admit White Noise is among my favourite books, making me both the film’s natural audience and the most snippy, over-possessive one possible. (Price that into this review of a funny movie from a smart cookie film-maker.)

But Baumbach seems torn too, caught between reverence and his own nagging dread that he has to do more than just illustrate an audiobook. The cryptic “airborne toxic event” that forces the Gladneys to flee their home makes the film shape-shift into deadpan disaster movie. Later, familiarity beckons. “All plots tend to move deathward,” Jack says. In Noah Baumbach films, they head instead for marital discord, the trials of Jack and Babette amped up into an echo of Marriage Story.

Driver plays Jack as a solo act anyway. Gerwig is muffled, which in truth, Babette demands. But these parts must be nightmares to perform. They were simply never movie characters, but vehicles for ideas about mass communication, group identity, the allure of supermarkets. Like everything here, they belong on the page. The more you watch, the more you see precisely why this never became a film before.

With its pace and pulse, DeLillo’s White Noise might feel cinematic, but really it is a literary enterprise, a novelist teasing up a pastiche sitcom. On screen, Baumbach just makes it a literal one. And the ideas have mostly vanished, even as the one-liners remain, stuffed and mounted as proof that he finally, at least, got it made.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from December 2 and on Netflix from December 23