Rich in fifteen films, Noah Baumbach's filmography returns to the front of the stage after a Marriage Story in 2019 which had made a big noise (and was crowned with an Oscar for Laura Dern's second role). Indeed, the director releases his new feature film, White Noise, strange triptych mixing the genres...
A career and a book
Baumbach, it's a filmography rich as a director: we were talking about the recent Marriage Story, but there was also Berkman split up (or his most beautiful English title) The Squid and the Whale), or France Ha. In parallel, Baumbach also offers a great career as a writer since he has collaborated twice with Wes Anderson, participated in the writing of Madagascar 3 and soon so much commented Barbie of the Greta Gerwig. A director who is none other than his wife, but also and above all the main female role of White Noise. The loop is closed.
For this latest film, it is based on the novel Background noise of the Don Delillo released in 1986 in France (author already adapted to the screen, notably by Cronenberg in his Cosmopolis). A story of a train accident, causing the evaporation of the chemicals it carried and the birth of a toxic cloud threatening a whole part of the United States. Not without humour, the author embraced his subject while seizing obsessions that shook the American middle class at that time.
Hitler, Elvis and a train
Baumbach appropriates himself, allowing history to take place in the 1980s but updating the underlying layers of narration that test the phobias of society. Thus we find the professor of Jack Gladney University (Adam Driver), specialist of Hitler, an out-of-pair orator who is playing madness but who, back in his home, leaves his university toge to become a simple father of family and the loving husband of Babette (Greta GerwigHis wife. The above-mentioned rail accident will disrupt their lives and exacerbate their internal tensions, whether it is a chronic fear of death for the moon, but also their internal family neurosis and ubiquitous technological anguish.
True love letter to the cinema, White Noise navigates between the genres to offer us sometimes pure horrific sequences, sometimes a whole segment of an invigorating SF that recalls the breathless escape of Tom Cruise in World War. The feature film also opens on a montage of mechanical accidents caught through the history of seventh art and the teacher's exhortation (played by Don Cheadle) of « Looking Beyond Violence ». An imploration that one will try to apply throughout the film, since violence is constantly being discussed.
Atavic violence
First of all, this train's spectacular sheeting, but also and above all the ferocity with which American society is portrayed. All in all, it seems driven by resolutely brutal telluric forces: addiction to medicines involving makeshift prostitution, destructive follies of these beings trapped in a situation that escapes them, fighting cocks between teachers (giving rise to a magisterial parallel montage between Elvis and Hitler, carried by an Adam Driver overflying)... A native violence, therefore, ubiquitous as background noise (« White hazel ») of the title, which waits only the spark to ignite the social body, not without recalling images of crowd movements or riots in supermarkets during the recent pandemic. A comparison that is not annoyed when it is known that shooting has started in full resurgence of coronavirus cases in the USA, and that this story of invisible threat, hovering in the air and making paranoid people have enough to put the chip in the ear.
Yet, the visceral fears of the characters and their existential anxieties – compensated by drug addiction and almost unhealthy hyper-consumption – prefigure something else, a more devious change... The same strange threat in the recent Smoking makes cough Dupieux, and its fence on a bitter happy-end punctuated with the tireless robotic repetition: « Change of era, in progress... ».
A shift towards a technological era, in the 1990s, already foreshadowed in the film by the diagnosis of Jack's health (Adam Driver), delivered not by a doctor but by a computer. Disincarnate, dehumanized and hysterical, like much of the film where the ambient cacophony plunges the spectator into a state of palpable tension.
What's up?
While the film is therefore faced with moments of bravery, of which three scenes are supernatant (the horrific scene in the bed, the parallel montage described above or the segment of pure science fiction), Baumbach, however, fails to maintain the rhythm of his narrative without avoiding a few soft stomachs. Imposed by parts that are sometimes too chatty (although beautifully dilogued), White Noise Probably would have won to be cut short by a few dozen minutes. Nevertheless, one of the very nice surprises of the beginning of the year remains at Netflix, and indeed confirms the talent of this director and screenwriter, while making us stumble with impatience before the arrival of the UFO Barbie On our screens.
[...] May she be an actress in a big movie Netflix directed by her husband Noah Baumbach – White Noise – or in the very little horror movie offbeat Baghead, or already director in [...]