'White Noise' review: Ambitious, but not easy to watch

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Writer-director Noah Baumbach adapts "White Noise," a 1985 novel by the renowned author Don DeLillo, into a postmodern deconstruction of American life starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

It's a significant new direction for Baumbach, a heavily stylized production that finds the filmmaker shifting away from the personal, relationship-driven stories that have been his specialty ("Marriage Story" etc.).

Set in 1984, the story concerns Jack Gladney (Driver), a college professor whose studies focus on Hitler and Nazi Germany. He's married to Babette (Gerwig) and together they raise their children from previous marriages, as well as their child together. The plot involves what the movie deems a "toxic airborne event," as well as an underground drug, infidelity, a car chase, frequent visits to the A&P and plenty more.

Co-stars include Don Cheadle as a fellow professor — he's trying to get "Elvis studies" off the ground at their very strange college.

MY SAY Baumbach isn't the first filmmaker to make a DeLillo adaptation, but there's a reason relatively few have tried: He's a difficult author to translate to the big screen. 

Whether or not Baumbach, an acute observer of the human comedy in its many forms, is the right person to try a long-in-the-works "White Noise" movie matters less than the fact that it comes complete with the same pitfalls that have bedeviled the likes of, say, David Cronenberg ("Cosmopolis") in the past.

The aggressively mannered dialogue and characters border on total abstractions. There's not an actor around that can make a line like "I'm tentatively scheduled to die" sound anything less than completely forced. Driver does the only logical thing and goes in a big, showy direction, but it doesn't help the audience develop a connection with the character. Gerwig has even less to work with.

So it is that Jack and Babette come across as individuals retrofitted to fit into a particular absurdist schema rather than actual people trying to make sense of the strange, confounding world around them.

Baumbach piles up one manic development after another in a discordant fashion that makes the picture seem like a series of loosely connected short films rather than a cohesive narrative. The thread connecting all three acts of the movie, DeLillo's vision of existence as a sort of way station before death that's replete with insignificance, remains clearly elucidated but far too cerebral.

The ambition behind "White Noise" deserves recognition, as does Baumbach's drive to challenge himself by finding a way into the novel and committing to a movie that defies simple, easy analysis.

There's one genuinely magical sequence, a heavily choreographed ensemble dance through the aisles of an A&P, that actually comes close to visually representing some of the big ideas at the core of this work.

Unfortunately, it takes place over the closing credits.

BOTTOM LINE Kudos to Baumbach for trying something new, but "White Noise" is an endurance test.