Movie Review: White Noise (2022)

White Noise (2022) written and directed by Noah Baumbach from the novel by Don DeLillo

A mid-1980s academic named Jack (Adam Driver) has a mildly successful career as a Hitler scholar in a small town college. His wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) teaches fitness classes for seniors. They have a mixture of children from a mixture of marriages. The kids are precocious and quirky, having inane conversations with their parents and each other. Jack is getting ready for an annual conference on Hitler that his college is hosting, finally learning German so he won't be embarrassed in front of his international colleagues. The other professors have their own problems, including Murray (Don Cheadle) who wants to become an Elvis scholar but needs Jack's help. All their lives are thrown into turmoil when a nearby train wreck causes a toxic cloud to form. Initially, Jack and his family take a wait-and-see attitude. After a couple of hours, the police drive through and say everyone has to evacuate. The family piles into the station wagon and head off to their designated sheltering area, a nearby Scout camp. Their odyssey eventually leads back home but their experiences bring up issues between husband and wife that need resolving.

While the movie has a lot of interesting elements, it does not put those elements into a coherent whole. The film starts as a winsome family comedy with some jabs at the aloofness of academia. Then it shifts into survival-horror mode though the comedy keeps bleeding back in. Then it changes into an intense dramatic mystery and conflict for the couple. The connecting line of Jack and Babette's relationship is not strong enough to hold things together. Part of the problem is that the film lacks enough focus on any one element to give it a center. Jack's story gets the most time though his character is flat and unengaging. He loves his family in a poor and insufficient way at the beginning. The movie ends like he's changed but the result is not very convincing. Babette has more depth but a lot less time. The fear of dying is another central theme that is the most interesting and what the filmmakers say the most about. It gets drowned out by all the other stuff going on. The film also parallels the mis-handling of the Covid epidemic in its depiction of the toxic cloud incident but doesn't say anything original, coherent, or satisfying.

Not recommended--there's a ton of interesting ideas here that don't get enough attention and aren't fit together well enough for a coherent whole to emerge.