White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022)

[therewillbeblus]

Cheadle is 57 - he looks age-appropriate there, we just typically see him without hair to signify that and he's gifted with a face that doesn't wither

[Persona]

Other than the most generic trailer music I have heard in my entire life (which is really saying something), I like the teaser. Does what a teaser should do. Teases.

Poster is nice but the tagline is a little forced. Probably would have been better without one.

I kind of already knew they would be but seeing more images of Driver as Jack Gladney and Cheadle as Murray Siskind confirms that those two are simply perfect casting for their characters.

Kids seem about right. I am open to the idea of Gerwig as Babette.

I am at a total loss as to who Andre 3000 will be playing. Maybe a glorified cameo. I wonder if he might get that character who gets that one scene in the shelter with the monologue and then tells Gladney that he looks haunted and lost. And then there's Nivola Sr. and Jodie Turner-Smith, too, don't know if their roles have been leaked or mentioned anywhere.

[DarkImbecile]

I am at a total loss as to who Andre 3000 will be playing. Maybe a glorified cameo.

If I had to hazard a guess, maybe Mr. Gray?

[Persona]

I am at a total loss as to who Andre 3000 will be playing. Maybe a glorified cameo.

If I had to hazard a guess, maybe Mr. Gray?

I had thought Lars Eidinger was in that role.

[DarkImbecile]

Quite possibly! I haven’t looked at the cast list beyond the headliners, and Eidinger would certainly fit the book’s description of that character

[The Narrator Returns]

Wikipedia says Andre 3000 is playing Elliot Lasher and Eidinger is playing Arlo Shell.

[Persona]

Wikipedia says Andre 3000 is playing Elliot Lasher and Eidinger is playing Arlo Shell.

Yeah, I was just coming here to share that as I just saw it myself. And Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards.

Must have been a recent update because I had checked Wikipedia a few days ago and they didn't list their roles. Still aren't listed on IMDB. I found what might be the source article.

Still nothing for Alessandro Nivola. I find it amusing that he is in the movie while his actual kids are playing Adam Driver's kids. I first thought he might be the father character of one of them since Gladney's and Babette's family is ultra-blended but after double-checking, nope, Jack Gladney is the father of both Heinrich (played by Sam Nivola) and Steffie (played by May Nivola) though with different mothers. They've aged both Steffie (7 in the book) and Denise (11) up quite a bit from the book with May Nivola being about 13 when this was shot I believe and Raffey Cassidy, 21, obviously supposed to be playing an older teenager. Which is fine, in the book those characters talk far more like those ages so that might help from it coming off too precocious.

[Harvest]

[yoloswegmaster]

Being released theatrically on November 25 and will stream on December 30.

[hearthesilence]

Vertigo homage?

[Persona]

Reviews so far out of Venice are divided. Bradshaw gave it 5 stars but some of the other reactions say it is "too much."

EDIT: Reading more reactions and it seems that most of the critics have mixed feelings, with a general sentiment that they feel the movie is too deferential to the source material. I am not sure that's a negative for me, I was hoping for a semi-faithful adaptation, but I guess I could understand how it might not work very well as a film or if Baumbach wasn't able to calibrate tone/performances precisely enough to make it work.

Sidenote: it makes me truly jealous watching Venice reviews on YouTube from people who seem barely informed (most of these people have not read the book) and can barely offer anything in the way of critical analysis beyond "I like this, I did not like this, etc." and yet these people are living it up at Venice watching a bunch of films I really wish I was watching. Yes, I'm a little pathetically salty, haha.

[domino harvey]

[brundlefly]

[pianocrash]

Every thread is now a sublimated Vinegar Syndrome thread, thanks to Adam Rifkin!

[DarkImbecile]

I found this extremely enjoyable — one of the funniest and most delightful experiences I’ve had in a theater this year —and a major stylistic development from Baumbach, who nails the tone of the novel while adding a vivid palette and the most dynamic camerawork of his career.

Cranking up many of the exchanges of DeLillo’s florid language to near-screwball speeds, Baumbach also slows to linger on the moments of neurotic tension and anxiety that are so important to his mortality-fixated characters. Amusingly, he links the very particular milieu of a 1980s American college town with some stylistic and narrative choices that felt very specifically chosen to evoke the popular American family films of that era, particularly a silly car chase that echoes the station-wagon-based humor of a Chevy Chase family comedy. I loved the production design — the supermarket, the summer/refugee camp, the motel all ride a very delicate line of era-specific accuracy and generic unreality.

The cast delivers, with each of the primary performers getting at least one big standout scene; Driver and Cheadle’s dueling Hitler-Elvis lecture is maybe my favorite, though Gerwig also nails her big confessional scene.

Very interested to see if Baumbach continues to build off of this major shift in style, material, and ambition or reverts back to the more contained, controlled mode of his previous work. My understanding is that this was a very difficult production and I’m sure a precarious adaptation process, but he landed it and deserves the chance to work at this scale again if he desires.

… it seems that most of the critics have mixed feelings, with a general sentiment that they feel the movie is too deferential to the source material. I am not sure that's a negative for me, I was hoping for a semi-faithful adaptation, but I guess I could understand how it might not work very well as a film or if Baumbach wasn't able to calibrate tone/performances precisely enough to make it work.

Baumbach does in fact stick closely to the source novel in his adaptation — only a few relatively minor omissions and one significant change to the resolution of the Mr. Gray plot line. As someone who loved the book, I have zero complaints about that, but I could see how it might be difficult for people unfamiliar with it to find a way in.

[therewillbeblus]

Baumbach pulled off a tremendous feat in adapting a great "unadaptable" novel, without excising its literary style of enmeshed tones in existential melodrama, absurdist satirical comedy, and dry ironic wit. Most importantly, he demonstrates a solid reason for making this into a movie in the first place: Some of the subtle visual gags contained in extravagant set pieces, and the comic timing of Driver's character therein, are just dynamite- particularly during the Airborne Toxic Event traffic jam (i.e. the one-two punch of "Is this all from that crash?" and the nonchalant beer sip from a passenger in a totaled RV). I don't know how much credit is due to Baumbach's editor, but regardless of how perfectly-tuned some segments are, it's really Baumbach's confidence in orchestrating the beats of wry humor and blocking action that elevate this film into greatness, at least during that first hour. Other than the obvious broad thematic interests in flawed humans' difficulties coping with the enigmatic variables they cannot grasp, reactivity to shifting relationship dynamics, and protective barriers constructed and complacently dispensed to avoid facing these vulnerabilities, I didn't detect Baumbach's signature fingerprints of raw depth embedded in objective confrontation of character, and no matter how much I enjoyed this, I sorely missed that.

Yes, it takes someone who truly comprehends and is willing to engage with the grayness inherent in humanity to successfully adapt books like this, and that's a special asset, but his skills were better served in creating original works with characters like Margot or Greenberg who are amongst the richest and most authentically complex people I've seen in movies. There's something morally valuable about his fearlessly uncompromising approach to humanism; a refusal to deviate to reductivist judgement of his characters without apologizing for them either, relentlessly holding them accountable with an equitable shred of empathy. They evade morally binary categories too often sought or subconsciously-defaulted to in cinema today. I'm glad to see Baumbach realise a dream of his, and do something divergently remarkable with his talent, but in revisiting the bulk of his filmography during the lead-up to this film's release, I feel pretty strongly that his voice is still needed elsewhere.

So while I hope this was a one-off departure, that's solely because I'm comparing something that's great fun to exceptional artworks executing a rare, imperative perspective on the human condition; a film where darkness is undercut with a swing towards screwball silliness rather than bitter observational humor that forces us to confront and caustically identify parts of us we dare not do outside the safe space of a movie. This film is a blast, and despite the uneven structure (and a back half that's distinctly loose in blending these tones, letting them bleed a bit far in darker directions only to mostly-successfully reel them in when it counts), I'm genuinely surprised at the lackluster response to it by many critics and audiences. The film is dense but admirably not overwhelming so. There's a Tati-esque quality to the jam-packed theatrical interplay here that will surely reward revisits (although the most obvious nod comes in the wild end credits sequence!) in lyrical easter eggs bursting at the seams of this picture. Some lines are stated hastily from afar and barely discernible from single characters speaking, and other times the overlapping background dialogue carries three or four conversations simultaneously, each one hilariously droll or sharply sardonic or just delightfully absurd in clashing with the other sound mixes that are just slightly more in focus... Next time I'll have to turn on the subtitles, and probably catch about ten times as many jokes embedded in there. I laughed consistently throughout this as it was, but I love knowing that undiscovered punchlines exist and any film that earns audience returns by gifting new experiences via its layered design is a success in a vacuum.

Also, this isn't exactly a complaint because I knew as soon as this project was announced that there would be absolutely no room for it and it was a smart cut for the medium, but Orest Mercator's surreal discipline trials with his cage of vipers is one of the most memorable parts of the novel, and I was hoping against hope that it would find its way in. Oh, and to anyone who hasn't read the DeLillo source and loves this, run don’t walk to purchase Underworld immediately. I've said it before, but it's unquestionably my favorite novel, and revisiting this story only reminded me how it recalibrates and builds upon White Noise's bite-sized strokes of genius in every conceivable way to create the Greatest American Novel, full stop.

[Matt]

I feel targeted by this film, some of which was shot in places I used to live and work! Like at least two separate locations which are one block away from former domiciles!

I’ve never read DeLillo, and I’m not sure I would like to after seeing this, but everything that would annoy me in prose (precociously verbose children, overlapping dialogue, cultural studies academic lectures, et al) works great here in cinematic form. I don’t know if I love it, but I really enjoyed watching and listening to it.

Supermarket set, production design, art direction, set dressing, and costumes are all stunning; extremely period-precise but exaggerated just enough to underline the fantastic and satirical elements of the film.

I wonder if the Andreas Gursky by way of Punch Drunk Love visual reference was intentional or is this just an irresistible composition?

[The Curious Sofa]

Netflix must have thought they'll have this year's Don't Look Up on their hands, with another broad satire about people in denial in the face of catastrophe. Apart from Adam Driver's performance and the title/credit sequence, not much about White Noise worked for me. This type of absurdist comedy, with characters either stating the blindingly obvious or the opposite in a hermetically sealed Wes Anderson/Tim Burton-style universe is hard to sustain for 135 minutes. When nothing carries emotional weight, there is not much to invest in and the way Baumbach directs action to engage on a more conventional level won't make Spielberg lose any sleep. Then there are truly clumsy decisions like Cheadle actually commenting on Gerwig's impossible to ignore 80s perm, just in cased we didn't get it.

The satirical targets are very much of the era when the novel was written. How relevant is sneering at academia when the USA's current problem is one rampant anti-intellectualism and the way it deals with basic existential dread feels sophomoric. There are a couple of scenes when the film leans into horror which worked for me, the

Spoiler

James-Wan style bed sheet phantom and the toxic cloud behind Driver at the petrol station

made me wish the film had gone for a much darker tone.

Baumbach is very up and down for me, Frances Ha was his first movie which landed for me and I loved Marriage Story but I found the broad farce of Mistress America unbearable. White Noise is closer to that, though at least it was odd enough to not make it a total loss for me.

[knives]

I feel targeted by this film, some of which was shot in places I used to live and work! Like at least two separate locations which are one block away from former domiciles!

I’ve never read DeLillo, and I’m not sure I would like to after seeing this, but everything that would annoy me in prose (precociously verbose children, overlapping dialogue, cultural studies academic lectures, et al) works great here in cinematic form. I don’t know if I love it, but I really enjoyed watching and listening to it.

Supermarket set, production design, art direction, set dressing, and costumes are all stunning; extremely period-precise but exaggerated just enough to underline the fantastic and satirical elements of the film.

I wonder if the Andreas Gursky by way of Punch Drunk Love visual reference was intentional or is this just an irresistible composition?

I’ll co-sign to this, though with the added information that I do in fact dislike DeLillo’s prose. What is burdensome and annoying for me on the page becomes hilarious and engaging when fused to montage and mis-en-scene. The cinematic aspect really makes the movie which often reminded me of Linklater’s Waking Life and some late ‘60s Godard.

[beamish14]

The shot of Driver in the phone booth is a straight lift of a scene from The Conversation, and the scenes in the garage echoed Close Encounters

Godard is clearly a point of reference for DeLillo, too. His non-anthologized early story “The Uniforms” is a very obvious riff on Weekend