#MovieReview: White Noise is an exercise in uneven adaptation

White Noise is a brazen attempt at bringing a long-thought ‘un-adaptable’ book to the screen, and mostly proves that maxim correct.

Critical darling director, Noah Baumbach (known for Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale) returns with a passion project, taking on Don DeLillo’s beloved 1985 novel.

For avid readers of a certain generation, White Noise was a touch-point of absurdist postmodern literature, tackling existentialism, masculinity and modern academia.

Baumbach was clearly one such reader and is somewhat constrained by his clear reverence for the source material.

But to his credit, Baumbach took 20 years of career momentum and swung for the fences, spending $100-million of Netflix’s money on a big movie that was always likely to have a niche audience.

There is simply no way that White Noise would be made in the current studio system, so fair play to Netflix for empowering an auteur. Whether it makes financial sense is yet to be seen.

Spoilers to follow
White Noise follows professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his blended family, including fourth wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their combined four kids.

Set in an unspecified town in the American mid-west in 1984, the film begins as a gentle comedy on the mannered absurdism of academia – particularly in the field of Hitler Studies, which is Gladney’s chosen subject.

This all changes when a nearby train accident causes toxic waste to fill the air in what later becomes known as the ‘airborne toxic event’.

The vaguely described environmental threat was believed to be unfilmable, but is one of the most successful sequences of the movie and probably what took most of that massive budget to pull off.

Gladney’s comfortable life, as the tenured preeminent expert on a ridiculous topic, is soon upended and he is forced to face the toxic event as the so-called protector of the family.

Well, the family makes it through, but Gladney becomes obsessed with the possibility that he may fall victim to long-term health effects.

This, coupled with a revelation in his marriage, completely shifts Gladney’s worldview and his internal struggle makes up the final third of the movie.

White Noise grinds to a halt for this section, wasting the potential of its first half and refusing to differ from the book, which has the narrative space to fully explore the personal crisis.

Although it is a valiant effort to fully capture the magic of DeLillo’s writing, Baumbach’s uneven adaptation ends up feeling like an echo thereof.

Rated 18 for language and scenes including violent and sexual content.
White Noise can be found on Netflix.
3/5.

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