Please note: This was screened in Oct 2022
Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s ‘unfilmable’ cult novel is a wonderfully idiosyncratic dark comedy starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.
How best to describe the indescribable White Noise? It’s a film about nothing and everything – about life, death and the nuclear family; it grapples with nuclear reactions, mysterious medicines and the sacred space of the supermarket. Driver’s Jack Gladney, a four-times married college professor, leads an ordinary life – or as ordinary as one’s life can be when you’re a pioneer in the field of Hitler studies but have only just started learning German. Joined by an all-star cast playing family, friends and co-workers, including Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith and Lars Eidinger, Driver’s anti-hero finds himself on a journey to conquer his crippling fear of death, with some very unexpected results.
Fans of Baumbach will delight in yet another sharp and comic look at human relationships. But White Noise sees the writer-director playing with genre and form in new ways, creating a film that’s both a love letter to DeLillo’s book and Baumbach’s most ambitious and surreal project to date.