Venice Film Festival 2022: White Noise (Opening Film in Competition) | Review
Noah Baumbach’s latest feature White Noise opens the 79th Venice Film Festival Competition program to favorable reviews but leaves us a little less convinced.
Following his raving success A Marriage Story, Baumbach uses his carte blanche to imbue his worldview complete with trailing thoughts and bubbling song on a DeLillo classic. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
It is both partly unclear what Noah Baumbach is trying to say with his new feature and at the same time, the messages couldn’t be more eye-rollingly blunt. It feels like there should be more behind this indulgent postmodernist depiction of society but if there is, the meaning is buried too deep. If the story is bound by the DeLillo novel that inspired it, perhaps more artistic would have served it better.
Baumbach returns to his trusted collaborators on a project that is arguably the pinnacle of Baubachism. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are Jack and Babette Gladley – a modern family amalgamates of former divorcees and their children. They are first depicted as all functional and aspirational American families are – during the breakfast rush where they exchange indulgent dialogue as if reciting it to each other during rehearsal.
We soon learn that Driver is a celebrity lecturer who specializes in Hitler. This is meant to be a joke and a judgment. So is his wife’s addiction to mysterious experimental pills that could be causing her memory loss. So is a giant toxic cloud that looms over the hill that Jack is refusing to acknowledge is dangerous and deadly. So is the Shell sign that appears over his head as if a divine apparition. So are his nightmares that suffocate him regularly and at times literally. They are the strongest pointer that not everything is as ideal as it seems in this middle-class paradise.
In White Noise Baumbach makes sure to show us that the story it tells isn’t to be taken at face value. He dresses the university debates and shopping trips into pastels and candy colors so that they feel like toffee apples – delectable to look at, but hard to chew. A similar effect is achieved with the lilt of everyone’s speech. For most of the movie, the characters sound like whiny teenagers.
It is not out of place for them to be so. Gladleys spend their time on screen challenging the norm only to find comfort in being the norm themselves. This is how Jack Gladley can be revered as a forward thinker while obsessing with Hitler. Or why when given an excuse he embraces violence. This is why Babette uses sex to escape the fear of death or why the nun they meet chastises them with the words: “If we didn’t pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.” The characters are openly contradicting their assumed personas, but it is a fact that we all eventually do.
Baumbach litters White Noise with allusions to all woke battlefields from COVID to climate change only to retain his focus almost exclusively on death by the last third of the movie. “I fear death more than I love you,” admits Babette. “Imagining yourself dead is the lowest childish form of self-pity,” philosophizes Jack. The movie abounds with such airy thoughts, but Baumbach doesn’t extrapolate a statement from them. That’s why White Noise feels like it takes a long long time to write down an equation without ever working out a solution.
