White Noise

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,

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.

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 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.

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.