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Stuck at home in an emptied-out New York City during the pandemic, filmmaker Noah Baumbach and life partner actress Greta Gerwig cast around for something different to the naturalistic indie films with which he made his name.
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“It was either, we were going to do something in the
apartment or a Spielbergian apocalypse movie,” Baumbach
told Deadline,
He picked up a novel that he’s read once before as a
teenager and which spoke of a different apocalyptic tragedy.
"It had a big effect on me at the time," Baumbach
told NPR's
Steven Inskeep. "I kept stopping and reading it aloud to Greta or to anybody
who would listen and just saying, I can't believe how much this book speaks
really to all time... then it coincided with the pandemic. And that's really
when I thought, well, maybe I'll try to see if there's a movie here."
White Noise is his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s
1985 novel, which centers on professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), wife Babette
(Gerwig), and their precocious children, as they confront physical and
metaphorical crises.
We learn from a New York Magazine profile by
Jon Mooallem that everything that
Baumbach loved about the novel —the headiness of its language the density of
its ideas, the archness and unreality of its world — had given White Noise
a reputation in Hollywood as
unadaptable. But to Baumbach, the core of the book always felt vivid and real.
With its $100 million budget, this is the most ambitious
project to date for Baumbach, whose breakout film was The Squid and the
Whale (2005) and whose last film was the critically acclaimed Marriage
Story (2019).
Some of that money is evident on the screen, from an
explosive train crash to a car chase through the woods “and the scariest CGI
cloud this side of Nope,” writes
IndieWire’s Eric Kohn.
Like Jordan Peele’s blockbuster, White Noise echoes the
spectacle of Speilberg and in particular Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Cerebral and escapist, it’s unlike anything
the filmmaker has made before. “That was exciting for me,” Baumbach told Kohn.
“I think of this movie as floating somewhere above reality. It’s close but not
entirely with its feet on the ground.”
It is also a satiric look at the way academia reduces all
culture to cold analysis., something that IndieWire believes has modern
resonance.
“We all go through this with the internet,” Baumbach said.
“I’ve watched YouTube a lot. You can see all these different things of totally
different value. You can look at the horrors of the world or old commercials,
and it all suddenly takes on some kind of equal value when you’re looking at it
that way. Bo Burnham even sings about it.”
An example of the banality of modern discourse: In the film
two teachers compete over whether Hitler or Elvis serves as a more involving
object of study. “You’re teaching Elvis, you’re teaching Hitler, you lecture on
their relationships with their mothers, and they become of sort of equal value
for the moment when of course they’re not,” Baumbach said. “Everything gets
leveled out in our culture.”
Filmmaker
magazine reckons these central themes—"about media oversaturation in
American life and the weird effects it has on people’s brains—have aged
remarkably well; while the novel ties them specifically to terrestrial TV, the
basic idea’s hardly changed. We’re all trapped in the opening scene
of Reservoir Dogs, forever.
The film’s centerpiece is a vast, elaborately mounted
sequence in which the couple flee an ‘Airborne Toxic Event,’ the result of a
tanker crash.
“Stepping far outside his typically restrained visual style,
Baumbach lays on a spectacular comic microcosm of a disaster movie, as crowds
flee, jam the highways, and hustle ruthlessly for space,” says critic
Jonathan Romney who also suggests the scene becomes a “farcical family
adventure, a sort of National Lampoon’s American Apocalypse.”
Baumbach also had British cinematographer Lol Crawley (The
OA) shoot the movie on 35mm anamorphic film (with some VistaVision handled by
the second unit) which isn’t exactly the most cost-effective approach. It’s a
choice questioned
by Filmlinc who are curious how this passed Netflix.
“It was kind of established very early on,” Crawley says of
the format. “My recollection is that Netflix had got behind the idea of it
being shot on film before I was even in the mix. And combining film with
anamorphic seemed to do the heavy lifting of the aesthetic. It’s like, you
combine Jess Gonchor‘s fantastic set design and shoot it anamorphic, on film,
and you’re like: okay, that’s in the ballpark”
Interviewed
by director Wes Anderson Baumbach explains how he worked again with
choreographer David Neumann, having previously teamed for Marriage Story.
“It’s like blocking, but the movement and the dialogue work
in concert. In the beginning of the film, it’s more in control. There are these
rituals we have; the morning ritual, the shopping ritual, the work ritual, the
bedtime ritual. Then, in the third part, it’s how they start to fracture once
we become more aware of what these rituals are invented to disguise. The camera
starts to break free in ways as well. By the end, it’s been freed entirely so
that it can become something totally abstract.”
Baumbach also talks of his collaboration with Danny Elfman,
saying that he thought the composer could unify the film’s genre-shifting.
“My fantasy of Danny Elfman was that the death aspect of the
movie would appeal to him. And it did, very much. But he also did a lot of
electronic music with orchestral music. We were also talking about Aaron
Copland and the Americana of it. So it was sort of this Aaron
Copland-meets-Tangerine Dream idea that ended up in the movie.”
Baumbach, says Romney, “replaces the novel’s philosophical
cool with a more demonstrative, sitcom-style irony—a kind of meta-goofiness.”
Filmmaker magazine found White Noise, “a formidable display
of how to spend lots of money” in relating to sequences, “with their seemingly
hundreds of cars and similar numbers of non-CG humans” but “what Baumbach
doesn’t have is Spielberg’s impossible smoothness.”
New York Times critic AO Scott wasn’t entirely convinced
either.
“Baumbach, working
on a larger scale than he has
before, pulls off a few fine cinematic coups… but there is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and
notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere,”
he writes. “White Noise is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe
in it.”
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