WHITE NOISE (B-minus) - It's often a neat trick adapting a novel to the screen. It's not like Don DeLillo's '80s novel White Noise is impossible to translate to cinema; but Noah Baumbach just doesn't have the ear and the eye for this particularly attempt. The result is a sloppy, choppy undercooked film that drags past two hours.
First things first: Adam Driver remains undefeated. Last time he knocked out Scarlett Johansson in Baumbach's "Marriage Story"; this time he TKO's Greta Gerwig, as they play a couple who have a blended family and who must guide their brood through an environmental crisis (a mysterious "airborne toxic event"). Driver leans into the lead character Jack (which he styles as J.A.K.), a Hitler studies professor at an elite college, lumbering behind a middle-age paunch and peeping suspiciously from behind blue-tinted eyeglasses. He somehow nails the unique cadence of DeLillo's dialogue and wonderfully unfurls the exasperation of Jack among both his colleagues -- including a chipper Don Cheadle as a pop-culture academic -- and his precocious, ever-curious children.
Gerwig, however, can't find the right pitch as Babette, who has turned to the experimental drug Dylar to fend off her existential fear of death. A critical scene in the second half cripples the movie, as Babette breaks down while confessing the Dylar mystery to Jack, and Gerwig, beneath of bundle of '80s curls, blubbers and stammers in a desperate search for authenticity. It's a rare misstep for her. I much preferred the natural ease of May Nivola as the youngest daughter, a sage counter-balance to Jack's elusive, shape-shifting parental theories of the world and this crisis. The couple's kvetching about death becomes tone-deaf to the point where I started to wonder, "What are Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver so worried about?"
But this is Baumbach's baby, and ultimately his fault. He flails with a big budget, well outside of his normal indie-intimate comfort zone. For the first time, he offers us grand fireball explosions and hectic car chases and manic mob scenes, and it's all a messy melange of cinematic styles. You can find elements of Wes Anderson's whimsy, Steven Spielberg's gummy morality tales, Brian DePalma's suspense, and Robert Altman's overlapping line readings. The latter style is the only one Baumbach nails occasionally. He even spends a good seven minutes or so presenting an absurdly choreographed musical number in a supermarket over the end credits (to a thumping LCD Soundsystem romp). Who kidnapped Noah Baumbach and replaced him with Baz bleedin' Luhrmann? (A hat tip to the crew who stocked the colorful, pristinely organized supermarket, an important '80s symbol of American culture for DeLillo. The endless credits list 61 names in the production's Art Department alone. Remember that era's generic-brand packaging?)
Baumbach's devotion to DeLillo is admirable. He picked at the author's themes but failed to fully explore them. As the movie unfolds, a viewer can sense Baumbach having to hack away chunks of the novel in order to adapt it -- like a jet dumping fuel -- yet, somehow the movie still feels at least 20 minutes too long.
DeLillo is nothing if not a keen observer of male-female relationships, especially the verbal dance between man and woman. But the dialogue spreads across a page differently than it falls on our ears. Driver is best at slipping around the nuance of lines that can sound stilted when read aloud. He gives it a droll delivery and figures out a way to create a fully realized character. Of the demise of an obese colleague, Jack marvels at the enormity of the event and casually intones: "To be so enormous, then to die."
You want to cheer for the cast and crew past the halfway point, but then everything falls apart in the final third of the movie. What is a winding diversion in the novel becomes an absurd, tedious head-scratcher of a final reel on the screen. Our patience quickly dwindles, the plot thread unravels, and Baumbach has lost his way, trying to corral too many moving parts. Over-indulged with an estimated $80 million budget, he sprays ideas all over the place and loses touch with the simplicity of a great author's subtle rendering of a fascinating story.
BONUS TRACK
The LCD Soundsystem finale, "New Body Rhumba," at the ol' A&P:
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