White Noise is, undoubtedly, the strangest movie Netflix has released this year, which is saying a lot given the competition. The plot is all over the place, the dialogue very stylized, and the overall atmosphere is engaging but off-putting. It's the type of movie that is sure to cause a lot of division in audiences.
At its core, White Noise is about a college professor named Jack and his middle class family dealing with their fear of death, but what actually happens is quite complicated. So complicated, in fact, that it feels like three separate movies smashed together. To be fair, the novel is just as ungainly and incoherent, but at least you had the sense that you were the one with the problem. There was a mystique to DeLillo's writing that made it seem like there was a lot going on thematically with the strange choices. But in the movie? It just seems like bad, pretentious writing. I'm not even sure if Baumbach knew what DeLillo's aim was, or if he just guessed.
One symptom of this is that the unnatural dialogue stick out like a sore thumb: in a scene where Jack's wife, Babette, says how open she is with communicating her feelings, Driver says "That is the point of Babette." In another moment, Jack is shopping with his coworker when said coworker suddenly says that Jack's wife's "hair looks important." What is the point of lines like this? Because all it accomplishes is taking you out of the moment and reminding you that you're watching a movie with a script. Not to mention the multiple long, unintelligible "philosophical" monologues that occasionally pop up. Is it an intentional commentary on the hollowness of academia? If so, then why are they presented so uncritically and played dead straight? It's just another disjointed element of the movie that seems unfinished.
But even if the script fails them, the cast and tech crew don't give up on trying. Driver and Gerwig give very different performances, the former acting almost like an intentional caricature of a sitcom dad, and the latter trying to be serious the whole time. And yet it's one of the few disparate combinations in the film that actually pays off: their acting is convincing as a real couple. Gerwig, in particular, brings emotion to scenes that were completely absent of it on the page. The production design and score are also on point, creating a distinct and interesting atmosphere that also furthers the film's supposed social commentary. But none of this is quite enough to save White Noise from itself and its shortcomings.
The best part of the film is far and away the end credits. I'm not saying that as some sort of flippant joke about the movie's quality, it's a genuinely incredible sequence. Somehow it captures the exact type of weirdness and existentialism and fun that's absent from the rest of the movie. It's so good that, in all honesty, you could probably skip the rest of the movie for it. White Noise is consistently watchable and unique, unlike anything else you'll see this year. But it's aimless, confused, and ultimately baffling to make any significant impact.
Final Score: 62/100.
