White Noise (2022)

Noah Baumbach has taken on Don DeLillo's allegedly unfilmable novel and returned with a handsome, unruly object that premiered at Venice and then settled quietly onto Netflix, where it could be paused by anyone who needed a moment. The film concerns Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies in 1980s Ohio, his fourth wife Babette, and four children who speak in the clipped, over-informed cadence of people who have read too much. A train derailment releases an Airborne Toxic Event, the family evacuates, and everyone spends the second hour contemplating death with the earnestness of a graduate seminar that will not end.

On the matter of representation, the film assembles a notably integrated cast for its Reagan-era Ohio setting. Don Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, and André 3000 occupy prominent roles, and the film declines to remark upon this at all, which is its own kind of statement. Race is never the subject. Neither is queerness, nor body image, nor neurodivergence, and the film makes no effort to summon them. Babette carries a genuine interior life and a secret pharmaceutical trial, though the film has no interest in patriarchy as a subject. The environmental catastrophe at its center registers as a surreal inconvenience, a plot engine, not a summons to save the planet.

The satire aims at consumerism, media, and the pharmaceutical trade, and it lands with a shrug. The closing supermarket dance number is the closest the film comes to a thesis, and it is content to smirk. There is academic lecturing here, plenty of it, on Elvis and Hitler and the fear of dying, but the lecture is aimed at the characters, not at us. We are left with a clever, well-dressed adaptation that would rather be strange than righteous. It is a relief, and it is also a little tiring.