The vibe is '80s suburban toxicity
Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a college professor, living a relatively stable if chaotic life in suburban America in the '80s. His wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) raises both his children and her own children from a previous marriage, while navigating issues of her own involving a mysterious illness that involves memory-loss and an equally mysterious pill. However, their life is turned upside down by the arrival of a chemical cloud over the town caused by a train crash, which sends them to a survivor's camp and exacerbates their chaotic natures...
As much as postmodernism has influenced movies such as 'Blade Runner', 'The Big Lebowski' and directors like Robert Altman and David Lynch, tackling postmodern literature is another thing altogether. Postmodernism exists to examine and play with structure, but it's ultimately too vague an idea that plenty of works that wouldn't be really considered by the label get lumped in with. 'White Noise' - authored by one of the leading lights of postmodernism, Don DeLillo - took aim at societal collapse, Reaganism, consumerism, and demagoguery. It's no surprise that all of this has become prescient in 2022, when societal collapse is a very real threat, Trumpism has supplanted Reaganism, and consumerism is in everything we see and hear.
'White Noise' is so frequently caught up in itself, so entirely impressed with its own ideas and concepts, that it fails to tell any kind of story. It's just vibes, and the vibes are toxic. Everything's coming to an end before everything's coming back to life and trying to move on. The cycle is continuous, without any real appreciation for what's happened and what is happening. Characters in 'White Noise' never fully realise or understand the enormity of their situation. The obliviousness is overwhelming. In fact, one scene makes this literal when Adam Driver's schlubby suburban dad is trying to manoeuvre the family station wagon down fast-racing river rapids, angling the wheels like he's making a three-point turn.
'White Noise' was long thought to be completely unadaptable, and it's not hard to see why. You can see how scenes like this would play out on the page, and how the atmosphere and the non-linear ideas would just add to it. When it's a novel, it's not necessarily important for things to make sense. Yet, when it's a movie and there are actors and set design and music to consider, things have to make sense because you've all got these people trying to make it happen. To Noah Baumbach's credit, he goes at it full tilt and so does the entire cast. Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, the great Bill Camp, everyone is giving it their all. Everyone is committed to making it work, even when it shouldn't. The madness and the chaos, they're all in - and 'White Noise' works, for the most part.
Baumbach's script and direction is less concerned with making sense or adapting 'White Noise' than it is trying to faithfully capture the essence of it. You can feel all of the sly humour, all of the wry commentary, all of the weirdness in every moment of 'White Noise'. That Netflix coughed up real money - close to $80 million, in fact - to make this is no small thing, and the same goes for lining up this cast as well. Driver is perfect as the sitcom-esque dad Jack Gladney, and Greta Gerwig likewise is able to match his energy and play off it in fascinating ways. Sam and May Nivola, who are both real-life siblings, play off each other with ease while Don Cheadle's dense monologues fill out the corners of the script in so many different ways.
'White Noise' is kind of clunky and weird and you're never entirely sure if it's taking the piss out of you as you're watching it. That's sort of the point. It's meant to be full of shit, because life itself is basically nonsensical. Like everyone in the movie, they're clinging to different things for some kind of grip on reality and themselves and find that it's all just as obscure and vague as everything else.