White Noise (2022)

One of my (not-so) guilty pleasures is disaster movies. I love stories of the struggle to survive and the exploration of what that brings out in people. One of the reasons I say it's (somewhat of) a guilty pleasure is that they are usually b-movie schlock and don't do a great job of capturing honesty in their narratives. But when they do they touch something in me. 

Based on what many consider to be a modern literary classic and directed by a film nerd darling, White Noise is the antithesis of the mass market disaster movies, it's a disaster movie for intellectuals, for cinemaphiles. Noise follows the same structure as the book, a three act play that flows through (1) set up, (2) disaster, and (3) aftermath. It explores through a mix of sardonic comedy and a talky, conversationalist script themes of destructive modernity. The disaster part is relatively short but captures a lot of what I truly enjoy about disaster movies and Baumbach tells a truly exciting story. But that is only a piece of what What Noise is about, it's a device to explore other things. So as well done as that part is, it is kind of a hook and not the substantive part of the film despite perhaps revealing a lot about the characters we are following. 

His set up and after math feel more normal Baumbach-ish. The script is awkwardly funny (sometimes more successful than other times) and the film leans into the quirky nature of its characters often to the point of excess. This means the characters don't feel very real. They feel more like caricatures or archetypes who don't talk like real people but like people from a novel. So I was torn through much of the final half of the film because many of the themes being explored were interesting but it often felt so clumsy and artificial how they were being explored. I always saw Driver and Gerwig as playing characters to fit the purpose of the story and not as actual people.  

Yet despite all the fumbling I kept enjoying the film's themes and its own rough explorations of it no matter how much the characterization kept pulling me out of the story. White Noise managed to pull out of being only a cerebral exercise occasionally and in those moments not only was it engaging but it was also interesting and I think overall it managed that more than it didn't. 

White Noise

Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lars Eidinger

Writer/Director: Noah Baumbach