White Noise movie

A family in 1980s garb. Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola, and Raffey Cassidy in White Noise. Wilson Webb / Netflix.

The cults of the famous and the dead.” “The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He paints it in almost religious terms: “Being here is kind of a spiritual surrender. But like the white noise machine I need to sleep, even though there’s nothing to drown out anymore, we’ve become so dependent on our cultural white noise that the idea of living without it is almost unbearable. He instead focuses on the larger existential point at the heart of the novel: that all of this white noise we’ve generated for ourselves — a drive to buy things, a fascination with catastrophes, technologies always humming in the background — is a way of distracting ourselves from the horrifying realization that we will die. It’s why people become obsessed with celebrities (like Elvis) or leaders who falsely promise us the world (like Hitler); in becoming part of a crowd, in losing ourselves to the emotional high of the performer, we can stop the feeling for a while. When they arrive, there are “forty cars and a tour bus” in the lot, and a lot of people standing nearby with photographic gear, taking pictures of the barn. Jack frequently muses on misinformation and disinformation (“the family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” he says at one point) — something that comes from the human brain’s inability to process everything flying at it, and our need to make sense of it with conspiracy theories. [lengthy](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208561) [peer](https://www.jstor.org/stable/25112247)- [reviewed](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831638) [papers](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40588075) and dissertations on White Noise, because it is not really just a story, though it’s plenty entertaining on the surface. It’s called “the most photographed barn in America,” and they start seeing signs for it long before they get there. What a strange and largely unremarked-upon choice — but the movie and the novel treat this as if it’s a totally normal sort of academic department to found. Jack can’t really believe that a disaster would happen to him because he is a well-off college professor, not the kind of person to whom disasters happen — which is to say, a person on TV.

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,

I first read Don DeLillo's 'White Noise', the book that serves as the source material for Noah Baumbach's new eponymous film, as a precocious teen.

They all are great, and Driver particularly is scarily believable in the role of a man drowning in the fear of mortality. Literary critics who swear by Don DeLillo's tome would disagree, but I would go so far as to say that the film gets across what the novel wished to say more efficiently. A truck crashes into a train carrying some toxic chemical and the result is an explosion that creates a huge monster of a noxious cloud, which then rains. One of the film's most entertaining scenes has the two faux-competing over the respective figures in a classroom. Add the fear of death, a universal theme across all cultures, and you have a potent cocktail of ideas. I re-read the whole thing a decade or so later, and while I appreciated its layers and themes, it was still difficult to finish.

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/)?

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.

Film critic Peter Travers shares his review of director Noah Baumbach's new film "White Noise," starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and more.

“White Noise,” which goes flooey more often than it hits the mark, needed more of that. “White Noise” plays like a Baumbach collaboration with DeLillo, a sign of respect to a virtuoso. The last two are the gifted offspring of actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer.

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.

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.

Adam Driver's latest film White Noise has received a Rotten Tomatoes score of 63%, following its release on Netflix.

"A strange brew. [Is Adam Driver's new Netflix movie White Noise worth watchin](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42238666/white-noise-review/) [In its four-star review of the film,](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42238666/white-noise-review/) Digital Spy wrote: "How much you like White Noise will depend on your willingness to succumb to the strictures of its storytelling world. [Movie Mom](https://moviemom.com/white-noise-2/) [Empire Magazine](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/white-noise/) [White Noise ending explained - what the hell was that about?](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42266707/white-noise-ending-explained-netflix/) [ABC News](https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/review-white-noise-sign-respect-virtuoso-completely-breaks/story?id=95940625) [White Noise](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a41050237/adam-driver-netflix-movie-white-noise-first-reviews/) has received its Rotten Tomatoes score, following its release on [Netflix](https://www.digitalspy.com/netflix/).