White Noise

Baumbach's last film, the critically acclaimed divorce drama Marriage Story, was nominated for Best Picture in 2020 before the world shut down. It gave Netflix ...

Overall, Baumbach stretches everything he could possibly imagine doing in a film and takes the biggest swing of his career with this one. In fact, some of the best things about this film is how Baumbach utilizes his increased budget this time around to create a second act that has action stunts and set pieces that feel more early Spielberg than Baumbach’s previous work. It’s all a part of avoiding what confronts us all the time. It also gave us one of the best “memed” movies of that year, complete with arguing velociraptors. Based on the U.S. With projects like David Fincher’s The Killer & George C.

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo's “unfilmable” satire tackling Hitler, Big Pharma and consumerism for Netflix, streaming Dec. 30.

You’d have to expect as much from a movie so committed to evoking an era of movies that belonged to the movie brats and their peers. They aren’t always DeLillo’s ideas, to the extent that this is even a reasonable expectation. Whether talking to his precocious kids or his colleagues, Jack and the other characters swap bits of insight like so much product, dallying in neat, smart-sounding summaries of the world that will nevertheless bring them no closer to making peace with the inevitable. What Baumbach basically gets right is that none of these goings-on, none of what a lush, consumer-forward, aspirational era has to offer, is enough to make up for the fact that we will all die anyway. His wife, Babette ( [Greta Gerwig](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/how-greta-gerwig-turned-the-personal-lady-bird-into-a-perfect-movie-126300/)), is a bubbly woman with a bubbly name, crinkle-curled half to death, with enough smarts to keep up with Jack and enough of a handle on reality to seem comparatively normal. I admire that willingness to glory in these big gestures, even as the movie that results can feel like a mix of vibrant and unexpected approaches to the material paired with the dreary, misshapen delirium of incomplete ideas. The kind of world in which a scholar of Hitler can lord his performative authority over his audience in the way that Hitler did, leaning into his own mesmerism, proving a point about charismatic fascism while convincing himself that he is no fascist. A simple matter of marital infidelity can aspire to the broad importance of a pharmaceutical conspiracy — a way of feeling connected to history while nevertheless navel-gazing, zeroing in ourselves. (He’s working on it.) He is, among other things, a man with [Hitler](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/hitler/) on the mind, sharing with that monster a penchant for public performance, for taking his audience to church, in his own way. There was the prolonged and argumentative death of a marriage, on one hand, and another throughline — the much more interesting strand of the movie — about the cruel legal maneuvers of their divorce proceeding, populated by lawyers and their talent for seeing people not as people, but as clients, bit players in some grotesque, lucrative game. Baumbach’s take on the novel — which, thanks in part to the movie’s sizable budget, qualifies as the director’s biggest and most ambitious movie to date — is flawed. [Noah Baumbach](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/noah-baumbach/) up to in [White Noise](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lcd-soundsystem-new-body-rhumba-white-noise-noah-baumbach-1234582828/)?

Noah Baumach's adaptation of the beloved novel is streaming on Netflix now. By Josh Zajdman Published: Dec 30, 2022. white ...

What it is and how it’s dealt with is just one facet of the story. Let’s hope that the adaptations of Libra, Underworld, and The Silence come to fruition. You have to read it and you have to read it before the forthcoming Netflix adaptation. Thrillingly, it’s also the work that is ushering in a new era of appreciation and attention for DeLillo from some unexpected corners—namely, Netflix. But, then there is White Noise, a modern classic if ever there was one and the book that DeLillo is arguably best known for. Deftly taking the reader from the Cold War to the turn of the century (and back again), Underworld is about everything and the way it’s all connected and how we too are all connected.

Why does Netflix's adaptation of the Don DeLillo classic end with a dance sequence in a supermarket? Director Noah Baumbach breaks it down.

“I’d like to think it captures that sense of the absurd that I loved about the novel.” “But when I saw the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess this makes sense.’ ” “With the dance itself, I don’t know that I ever fully understood what it was and why we were doing it,’ ” Cheadle says. “We had people come in off the street and just grab a shopping cart and start going up and down the aisles,” Gonchor says. “I had to provide a space that the dancers could tell a story through, using the aisles and shopping carts, with enough room to film a beautiful sequence.” “Some of the products in there were actually real — you’re like, ‘Why is this real meat?’ But the scope of it was amazing.” “I reached out to James while we were shooting and I told him I’d like him to write an upbeat song about death,” Baumbach says. “Even when it’s not an entertaining dance number, I like to have that time to just sit with the experience at the end of a movie. I don’t want to be immediately engaging in the meaning and saying, ‘What did you think?’ I want some time to just sit with the feeling.” “There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers,” DeLillo writes. I went to a lot of supermarkets with a different sense of observation, thinking, ‘What was Don DeLillo saying?’” Animated films like “Shrek” or “Despicable Me.” Even the odd raucous comedy like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel, starring Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, is a bizarre, messy, occasionally enthralling ...

Later, Baumbach shows he can mix action with comedy in a farcical station-wagon car chase that could easily hail from a Chevy Chase movie from the period in which White Noise is set. Although the showy, CGI train crash that precipitates the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t really work — it bluntly literalizes a disaster that, in the book, is all the more ominous for being distant and vague — what follows is an extraordinary, sustained sequence that echoes Spielberg’s masterpiece of collective madness, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (It’s also the first period piece he has attempted, and the heightened, day-glo interpretation of the 1980s in the costuming and production design is one of White Noise’s principal pleasures.) He rises to the challenge in unexpected ways. An accident unleashes a poisonous cloud known as the Airborne Toxic Event, and the Gladneys are caught up in a wave of panic. Adapted from the beloved 1985 Don DeLillo novel, White Noise is a baffling, uneven, sporadically enthralling movie about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a dry run for the end of the world. The besotted pair compete over which of them is more anxious about dying, but something seems genuinely wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is gathering on the horizon — literally.

A husband, wife and their friend chat at the end of a supermarket aisle. Adam Driver as Jack, from left, Greta Gerwig as Babette and Don Cheadle as Murray in “ ...

[hasn’t been in front](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-02-08/gerwig-best-director-oscars-women) of the camera for some time, or because the role falls too far outside of her typical woman-child repertoire. While the film elides a slew of minor characters and subplots, Murray’s omnivorous fascination is a counterpoint to Jack’s increasingly grim self-involvement. [Barbara Sukowa](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-02-04/review-two-of-us-french-romantic-drama-barbara-sukowa-martine-chevallier) presides at the German hospital where Jack lands near the story’s end (now with Babette in tow). In the process he draws a line from mass hysteria to human carelessness, the results of which can be similarly catastrophic. [Ann Roth](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-16-ca-herman16-story.html), who costumed De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill”). [Brian De Palma](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-brian-depalma-profile-documentary-20160606-snap-story.html), not a purveyor of innocent fun, who suggested Baumbach consider an adaptation to try things Baumbach’s own scripts wouldn’t allow. “Waves and Radiation” introduces us to the Gladney family and Jack’s academic work in his first-of-its-kind Hitler studies department. Case in point: In a closing supermarket scene, DeLillo described shoppers as “aimless and haunted.” In the film, the same moment ends in an eight-minute dance number incorporating the expansive cast. “Dylarama,” taking up the second half of both book and film, documents Babette’s clandestine participation in an unsanctioned medical trial. Yet framing this as a dichotomy glosses over the complexity of the source material. [White Noise](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-caw-paperback-writers3-2010jan03-story.html),” a scholarly friend discussing cinematic car crashes tells the story’s protagonist, “Look past the violence, Jack. Whereas the book built up a kind of fatalistic resignation,

Noah Baumbach's absurdist adaptation of the 1985 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo is a sometimes provocative stab at intellectual elitism. The story takes ...

“White Noise” is an overwrought attempt to incorporate a fun sense of whimsy into Baumbach’s keen and biting observance of the faulty human condition. His “Marriage Story” was a terrific examination of the disintegration of a relationship. The satire on display here is more embedded in the production design than a meaningful, engaging part of the central narrative. Unlike the hard-hitting frankness of Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” “White Noise” never feels anything more than a stylized parody. His lofty desire is to follow in Jack’s footsteps in becoming the foremost expert in all things Elvis. The story takes place in a surreal version of 1980s America.

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig star in Noah Baumbach's new dark comedy, White Noise. Here's how tall the star stands and other info!

19, 1983 in San Diego, and before becoming the successful actor he is today, he was in the Marines. [multiple reports](https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a30196109/adam-driver-facts/), the 39-year-old House of Gucci star stands around 6’2″. Driver’s latest film is [White Noise ](https://netflixlife.com/2022/12/30/white-noise-is-dylar-real-drug/)directed by frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, which he stars alongside Greta Gerwig.

A movie based on one of the great novels from the previous century has been released. It is based on Don DeLillo's book "White Noise."

The 1951 [DeLillo](/topic/delillo)has published 17 novels (perhaps 18 without verifying one written under an identity), five plays, a screenplay, and a collection of short stories throughout the course of a career spanning more than fifty years. For instance, the underworld.

Noah Baumbach's White Noise is a bold but deeply flawed adaptation of Don DeLillo's classic 1985 novel of the same name. The film is streaming now on ...

White Noise, in turn, returns to the same level of emotional separation throughout its final third that had previously dominated its opening act. Behind the camera, Baumbach shoots White Noise’s midpoint evacuation scenes with a kind of energy and slick style that he’s never employed in any of his prior films. That said, while White Noise firmly ranks as one of the most emotionally lifeless films of Baumbach’s career, its story does allow him to flex his muscles as a director in ways he’s never truly been allowed to before. There’s something admirable about White Noise’s overbearing strangeness, in fact, and the way in which it utterly refuses to ever even pretend that it exists in a world that resembles or feels like our own. Throughout its opening act, Baumbach’s latest film introduces viewers to not only the Gladneys, but also the off-kilter version of 1980s America that the film takes place in — one where nearly everyone talks with a stilted cadence and the kind of obnoxious, overly formal manner of speaking that can usually only be heard in the most oblivious and self-involved of college social circles. At times, the film feels so purposefully artificial and satirical that it more closely resembles the movies made by iconic film absurdists like Robert Downey Sr.

Confused by the Adam Driver movie White Noise on Netflix? Read this breakdown of the White Noise plot and ending explained.

In the movie’s final scene, Jack and his family go to the supermarket. In the morning, the cloud is once again encroaching, and the family has to drive off in a hurry. Jack and Babette spent the entire movie terrified of dying, and are forced to confront this fear in the hospital run by German nuns. Babette, who is terrified to die, tells Jack that the Dylar pill was supposed to cure her fear of death, but was not successful. Gray fires a shot just as Babette enters the hotel room, hitting Jack in the wrist, and Babette in the leg. The nun tells them it is her job to be in the small minority of people who pretend to believe in the things that no one else does, otherwise, the human race would die out. Jack in turn tells Babette he is “tentatively scheduled to die,” via his exposure to the toxic substance. Jack is forced to go outside in order to gas up the car, and while he is out there, the billowing cloud encroaches. Denise tells Jack that she was unable to find Dylar listed in any of her medical journals, and she suspects the medication may be affecting her mother’s memory. On the radio, they are told that anyone who is indoors should stay indoors, and anyone outdoors should find shelter ASAP—a direct contradiction to the previous order to evacuate. Read on for an analysis of the White Noise plot summary, White Noise ending explained, and what that White Noise ending means. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a professor at the fictional College-on-the-Hill in Ohio in the ’80s.

Greta Gerwig, left, and director Noah Baumbach pose for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film 'White Noise' during the 2022 London Film ...

A film full of chaos ends with the family shopping in the most organized supermarket imaginable. He finds out what the drug is and finds its dealer, but the drug is revealed to be ineffective at relieving their fear of death. When off the clock, he watches too many movies and writes too many Letterboxd reviews. He ultimately abandons his goal of killing the figure that haunted him the whole film. After a near apocalypse, people are no longer afraid when the toxic event ends. “Frances Ha” follows the titular Frances Ha, an aspiring dancer pursuing a career in New York City. Jack seeks revenge after finding out the dealer had sex with Babette in exchange for the drug. She held large roles in three of the four films, establishing herself as a strong actress and a mainstay in his films. She brings her characteristic sense of humor to the role to add layers to the otherwise heavy story. His previous role as Charlie in “Marriage Story” earned him a nomination for best leading actor at the 92nd Academy Awards. The film follows Jack Gladney, a Hitler studies professor, and his wife, Babette, who parent a mixed family. Gerwig, Bamubach’s partner, previously acted in four of the director’s other films.

Noah Baumbach's "White Noise" is not meant for everybody, but if you realize that chaos is the only thing that makes sense in our mortal lives, ...

“White Noise” makes us privy to the futility of our actions, our distractions, our fears, and our behavioral tendencies and gives us an unabridged version of what human life is all about. Like Jack and Babbette, most of us are not ready to accept that fact, and it takes a catastrophe to come to terms with the inevitable. Throughout the absurd events and conversations, one thing that remains common is the constant talk of death and how much the characters fear impending doom. The supermarket in “White Noise” represents not only the concept of consumerism but also a transitional zone between death and rebirth. Also, the whole concept of a supermarket is to make the customers think that they need something when, in reality, they do not. One of the worst aspects that came to light when the pandemic hit was how corrupted and disreputable the media had become over time.

The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat?

White Noise’s final act, in which the Gladneys try to return to their normal lives, is the toughest knot to untangle. Baumbach does his best to infuse his film with mundane dread, but for the viewer, existential horror can be easily confused with a lack of energy. Jack fends off the sarcastic children in his blended family, works to learn German to lend legitimacy to his post as a professor of “Hitler studies,” and assists his fellow academic Murray Siskind (Cheadle), who’s attempting to launch a similar department centered on Elvis Presley. It deconstructs the bucolic lives of the successful academic Jack Gladney (played by Driver in the film) and his wife, Babette (Gerwig). [two of](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/the-meyerowitz-stories-is-career-best-work-from-adam-sandler/542856/) the [best movies](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/11/marriage-story-review-adam-driver-scarlett-johansson-netflix/601600/) of his career for Netflix, and the cast he’s assembled here—including Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle—is top-notch. The adaptation takes the tale of a 1980s family dealing with the aftermath of a local chemical accident and gives it the vibe of a classic Amblin movie.