Hiding from the Black Cloud

Graphic by Chase Manze. Image courtesy of Netflix

The Walter Reade Theater sits at the elevated midpoint between Amsterdam and Columbus, architecturally unassuming in the shadow of the grand Alice Tully Theater, Met Opera, and David Geffen Hall. A short jaunt up some concrete steps and you're there, virtually indistinguishable from any other independent theater, excepting, on this particular night, for the plentiful standby line and practically floor-to-ceiling posters of Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, decked out in suburban intellectual 80s couture and fixed in front of a collage of supermarket price tags. The movie, set to start at 6:15, didn't. No one seemed to care.

The young fashion school duo on my right claimed that it was impossible to make "bad" ambient music, a frantic woman a row back recommended "Minions: The Rise of Gru" to her friend, the older couple to my left never took their wool coats off, silently watching the same six NYFF promotional slides cycle through the screen for the better part of an hour. When the lights finally dimmed and Baumbach took the stage to introduce the film, half the crowd craned their necks, almost avoidant, hoping to grab a glimpse of shiny celebrity: Driver, Gerwig, Cheadle all sauntering in the dim. In my fifth year attending the festival, the draw remains the same: sitting alongside a few hundred other people eager to connect with all facets of film, eager to see what's coming next. Somewhat surprisingly, Baumbach's White Noise justified the anticipation, deftly balancing what are essentially three different films tied together by the uniformly strong cast and Baumbach's bravura direction.

To state the obvious, White Noise is an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, published in 1985 and the recipient of the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. I can't pretend to have read it, so my reading of the film is an entirely independent entity authored and executed by Baumbach and his co-conspirators. With that being said, White Noise feels deeply literary from the first spoken word of dialogue to the last. The story follows Jack Gladney (Driver), a celebrated professor of Hitler Studies at a midwestern college known as the College on the Hill (filmed at Oberlin), and his robust family: his wife Babette (Gerwig) and their four combined children and step-children. The first third of the film, labelled "Waves and Radiation" by one of three secondary title cards, introduces the viewer to their world. The Gladney(?) family, if being described concisely, are weird eccentrics. Heinrich (an excellent Sam Nivola) is an all-knowing survivalist type, Denise (an even better Raffey Cassidy) dons a translucent green golf visor throughout the film and plays detective, trying to uncover secrets within their family.

On first watch, this "Waves and Radiation" segment was easily my favorite of the movie. Baumbach returns to the frantic, overlapping dialogue style of earlier films like The Meyerowitz Stories after the comparatively staid back-and-forth of Marriage Story. Multiple scenes take place in the Gladney family kitchen, with Jack, Babette, Henrich, Denise, and Steffie (May Nivola) almost operating on their own isolated trains of thought, meeting at intersections of indecision or uncertainty. It's somewhat reminiscent of Gerwig's excellent Little Women screenplay in which the actresses were instructed to begin speaking at specific points in another character's ongoing dialogue. The end result is laugh lines stacked on top of other laugh lines. It's important to note: White Noise is deeply, deeply funny, with Driver at the center of this delicate comic operation. It was rare that five minutes went by without at least one audience member in my immediate vicinity tittering to themselves.

The film grows progressively darker as it progresses. It's hardly a spoiler to say that the plot centers around a vehicular accident that produces an ever-growing black cloud which approaches the Gladney's rural college town. It's a bit within the film where government officials continue to re-classify the cloud as it expands, describing it first as a "plume" and later landing on "airborne toxic event." The mass evacuations prompted by the event lead to the largest, most ambitious scenes of Baumbach's career thus far. Cars flip, are chased, and slam through corn fields and barbed wire. In a particularly impressive scene, the Gladney family is forced to rapidly flee a government-assigned safe zone. Baumbach choreographs an elaborate sequence with hundreds of extras running, fighting one another, and driving through crowds as Driver ducks and weaves, attempting to save his daughter's stuffed bunny. A far cry from the largely one-on-one interactions of Marriage Story.

Much will be made of the three distinct tones taken on at different points in the film. It shifts from Baumbach's neurotic family comedies of old to a full-blown, anarchic disaster flick, to a slow, existential, noir. The real force holding it all together is Driver, in perhaps his gentlest performance to date. Consistently, when asked questions by his frazzled family, Jack feigns ignorance or lack of knowledge, seemingly hoping that by assuming the best and not engaging with terror he can buoy his family up and out of their shared anxiety. Driver, seen here with a considerable gut and schlubby clothes, sinks into middle-aged passivity, defined by his physical mannerisms and a desperate desire for peace.

Behind Driver's gentle, domestic exterior, are hints of a profound sadness and desire for happiness and calm that gets discussed at several points throughout the film. Contrarily, his scenes as a professor at the university evoke his performances as Henry McHenry in Annette and Adam in HBO's Girls. Loud, performative, spastic, but somehow always in control, Driver slides across classrooms and lecture halls in his black judge's robe like a preying mantis or evangelical preacher. He has such forceful control over his voice and physicality, you almost can't help but shrink back into your seat.

The supporting cast shines as well. Gerwig imbues Babette with some of the ennui last seen in her and Baumbach's Frances Ha, but couched within a deep intellect. Every spoken word feels at once innocuous and profound, with her inflection never varying too much. The final third of the film centers on her internal struggle and she effectively conveys a kind of muted sadness. The two oldest children, played by Cassidy and the older Nivola, are crucial, successfully channeling the chronically precocious children of Wes Anderson's filmography and achieving a similar sense of character and depth of emotion. Don Cheadle, playing one of Driver's university colleagues who specializes in living icons, opens the film and helps craft some of its best scenes through his charisma and intense chemistry with Driver.

When the film ended (after a prolonged musical credits sequence featuring a new song by LCD Soundsystem), the older woman next to me stood up, turned to me (a stranger) and said "that was a weird ass movie." It seems inevitable that most people who fire this up on Netflix will not finish it, despite its admirably quick pacing. By the midpoint of the film, Baumbach is caught spinning a number of plates in the air, with some falling in the process.

There are scenes that stray away from the strengths of the film (particularly the performances of the main and supporting characters) and set pieces that feel a bit clunkier than they would if handled by a filmmaker with more experience outside of various New York living rooms. However, it's hard not to admire the sheer ambition on display and the profound oddity of the story and performances. It's a big swing with a big budget (reportedly north of $80 million) adapting a major work of literature which tackles some of the most fundamental themes within American society. But it's also a hell of a good time if you're willing to give yourself over to the madness.