White Noise

Contains little spoilers …

I don’t quite know where to start with this.  A clever black comedy, apocalyptic disaster movie, family melodrama, pretentious academia, car crash theory and a great dance number to end.   I haven’t read the book this is based on, but I understand it has been long considered unfilmable.  I can see why but I’m also glad Noah Baumbach gave it a try.   

There are some wonderful set pieces, opening with an academic lecture about the joy and escapism in car crashes in film and then we meet Adam Driver as an insecure but pretentious and successful academic and his family who are fascinated with plane crashes and disaster on the tv.  The soundtrack is full of chatter, radio, tv and the distracting background of lives but there’s also a constant underpinning of dread.  You know something is coming. There’s a fantastically pretentious bravura  show off lecture battle between Driver (on Hitler) and Don Cheadle (on Elvis) and then we are into the middle act which is a pastiche of the apocalypse/disaster movie, with the cliché academic family man thrown into protecting his family without any of the requisite skills to do so. Loved the mercy dash to save the toy rabbit by the way. Although this is set pre-internet we have the conflicting information, lies, conspiracy theories and coverups familiar today.   The final section uncovers and resolves a family melodrama with a detour through the role of religion as anesthesia for the masses and ending with a musical number.

So what’s it about?   This is both a serious movie about the very human knowledge of our own mortality racing towards us, and also a very dry comedy overlaid with all of the white noise and nonsense we use to distract ourselves from that inescapable fact.  It’s pacing and tone are weird, it’s deliberately arty and pretentious and also laughing at that.   Loved the dancing in the supermarket at the end which somehow summed it all up very well - consumerism as escape. 

Thinking about my need these days to turn the music up and dance rather than listen to the news, this feels like a really sharp commentary on our lives now, with pandemics, war, threats to democracy and the coming climate disaster whilst the news is about royal feuds and love island.   ‘We keep inventing hope’ 

It’s a bit of a mixed bag, but worth it .