White Noise, review: Netflix cash plus DeLillo plot equals a very strange film indeed
01.09.2022 - 04:25
/ msn.com
has started to look unsustainable, and it was widely reported in June that the days of blank cheques had come to an end. Do the streamer’s offerings at Venice this year represent that era’s last, loopy hurrah? White Noise, which opened the 78th edition of the festival this evening, certainly has a “last days of Rome” feel about it.
Thrillingly arch and unsettling, it’s an adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel about an academic and his family weathering a surreal public-health crisis, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, whose previous film, Marriage Story, premiered at Venice in 2019. For this usually understated filmmaker, it’s a madcap outlier, and often resembles an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown.
Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at an obliviously smug liberal-arts college in the American Midwest of the 1980s. Greta Gerwig is his wife Babette, sheltering under a corkscrew perm and surreptitiously popping pills of Dylar, an experimental drug designed to suppress fear of death.
Baumbach’s screenplay retains the three-part structure of DeLillo’s novel, and the first section, titled Waves and Radiation, is an opportunity for the audience to retune itself to the film’s eccentric wavelength. There’s much Altman-esque cross-talk – lots of verbal jokes bubbling up from the background – while the setting is vintage small-town Spielberg with the contrast queasily cranked up.
The food and drink brands lining the supermarket shelves have a radioactive glow: the whole society looks like a health risk even before the Airborne Toxic Event comes billowing forth. This calamity unfolds when a fuel truck collides with a train carrying dangerous chemicals, and the Gladneys join
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