With a production budget greater than all ten of Baumbach’s previous movies combined, Netflix has showered money onto Baumbach. That same indulgence towards Baumbach is also asked of the viewer. Characters tend to speak in long paragraphs and the viewer has to put up with a kind of droning that no human would engage with. This is a lot to ask in a film as off-putting as this one. Baumbach has some satirical impulses, poking fun at the theatricality of academic elites, but everyone in the film is fawning over Jack’s and his colleague Murray’s (Don Cheadle) pop psychology profundity. It’s one thing if some characters are risible and it’s another if everyone is, which is largely the case here. Compounding this is a continued personal reluctance to engage with a character’s pathetic fear of death, especially for a professor of Hitler studies who’s otherwise swimming in it. With how many life extension grifts I have to scroll by on Twitter, I don’t want to find any of this childish idiocy in movies from directors whose past work I’ve loved. Listening to Jack ramble in the film’s cadence about something he should’ve reckoned with long ago is a recipe for teeth-gritting irritation.
DeLillo wrote the source material in the mid-80’s, and though Baumbach’s is a largely unsuccessful, he couldn’t have picked a better time to adapt it. The airborne toxic event and the conspiratorial mania that pops up around it is an easy match for Covid, especially in the difficult balance between authority and evolving information. What transcends the specifics of any one event is the way the Gladney’s imagine that they’re safe in the little bubble they’ve created, that nothing will ever penetrate their domesticity, that bad things only happen far away from here. As long as the trusty supermarket stays stocked, things are fine. White Noise keeps returning to the immaculately arranged shelves of the local A and P, culminating in a grand music video over the end credits. It’s in everyone’s recent memory how disorienting empty shelves can be, and a twist on the fear of death is the fear of change, of things moving from stability to entropy. Someone’s eventually going to call the Hitler professor on his lack of German knowledge, and someday the toilet paper’s going to run out. There’s definitely something to White Noise, but Baumbach’s not the person to bring it out. C-