Tropic Sprockets  / White Noise

By Ian Brockway

Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) adapts Don DeLillo’s complex novel “White Noise.” [Now showing at the Tropic, Showtimes and trailer at TropicCinema.com.] Mysterious, chaotic and pensive, its eccentric momentum keeps one watching. Full of surreal images and distant emotion, its gloomy tone offers much to ponder. 

Jack (Adam Driver) is a harried husband. He is a professor of Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill. His wife Babette (a nearly unrecognizable Greta Gerwig) is invariably worried and hyper.

Jack never knows what to expect. He is bothered by faculty and the best methods to approach his course. In one of his class sessions he shows films of cars colliding and exploding in the manner of a painting by Roy Lichtenstein—the imagery rolling and tumbling. At home staring down mountains of mashed potatoes, his kids chatter away. Jack is bombarded by endless segments of TV news reports. 

Baumbach here is paying tribute to Spielberg. The hectic pace is a perfect carbon copy of the Hollywood maestro with shots of the yelling children, but the stilted off key dialogue is Baumbach’s own.

At night, Jack attempts to communicate to his wife but is unsuccessful. He agonizes that she is taking some strange medication, foreign and opaque, named Dylar.

There is one scene where Jack’s worries take shape as a beast formed from bedsheets stifle his breathing. The singular scene is very frightening and quite scary.

One day, Jack and Babette are alerted that a cloud of toxic gas is headed their way. It is black and formidable. Cars crash and residents are hysterical. What enfolds is mayhem very much like “Ghostbusters” (1984).

The latter half of the film spins off of neo noir thrillers like “Angel Heart” (1987) and “Blood Simple” (1984).

The scenes in a shelter complete with medical masks will not fail to remind us of the pandemic. 

This is arguably Baumbach’s most accessible film. While the spaced out dialogue and bizarre tai-chi dance number might confuse and alienate the mainstream, the end-of-the-world diorama as presented is magnetic and charged, bolstered by strong performances from Driver and Gerwig. Whether you choose to see it as a surrealist catalog of 1980s cinema or a meditation on the year that was 2020, “White Noise” will go down in history as Noah Baumbach’s mumblecore horror film.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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