White Noise
It left me with a strange feeling, but not one of rejection. More like the feeling of having watched an ambitious, bewildering film, at times very funny and at times quite heavy. It is not easy to enter, and I do not think it always works, but it did feel like a proposal with personality. There are moments when it seems like an absurd family comedy, others when it becomes a disaster movie, others when it turns philosophical about the fear of death, and others when it simply lets itself be carried away by the noise.
What interested me most was that mixture of tones. The family life of Jack and Babette, with their children all talking at once, their overlapping conversations, their everyday fears and their supermarket routines, has something very strange and very recognizable. The film captures well a world full of information, brands, screens, medicines, news and sentences that sound important but vanish into the air. Everybody talks, everybody has an opinion, everybody consumes, but almost nobody really seems to listen.
I liked Adam Driver a lot. His character is both ridiculous and vulnerable: a professor specialized in Hitler who seems very confident in the classroom, but outside it is full of panic, insecurity and fear of disappearing. Driver knows how to move between caricature and anguish, and that sustains much of the film. He is not playing a hero or an admirable intellectual, but a man who has built a huge identity to cover a very basic fragility.
Greta Gerwig also works, although her character seemed more uneven to me. Babette has a buried sadness that grows little by little, and the film is right when it links her to the fear of dying and to that desperate need to find something that can calm the mind. The thing is that I did not always feel the same emotional force in that part. Sometimes it interested me a lot; at other times, it felt as if the film moved too far away from its characters to surrender to the concept.
The airborne toxic cloud section seemed to me one of the best parts. There the film becomes more physical, clearer and more entertaining. That whole block of evacuation, collective fear, contradictory information, cars, families, authorities and invisible threat works as a very strong satire of a society unable to react to disaster without turning it into spectacle, procedure or absurd conversation. When it enters nervous disaster mode, the film has an energy I appreciated.
I also liked its view of consumption. The supermarket is almost a modern church: bright, ordered, full of colors, promises and comfort. The characters seem to find there a kind of artificial peace, as if buying and walking among products could protect them from death. That final musical number, so strange and so apparently out of place, feels like a good summary of the film: everything is absurd, everything is choreographed, everything is artificial, but there is also something hypnotic in that collective foolishness.
The problem is that the whole is very uneven. There are brilliant moments, funny dialogue and a very carefully worked aesthetic, but also stretches where it becomes heavy. The film talks so much, changes register so often and accumulates so many ideas that at times it seems trapped inside its own intelligence. It wants to be satire, family drama, black comedy, literary adaptation, disaster movie and existential reflection all at once. That ambition has merit, but it also makes it scattered.
I completely understand anyone who finds it unbearable. Its humor is strange, its rhythm is uncomfortable and its way of talking about death can seem too intellectualized. It is not a film looking for direct emotion, but a kind of constant noise where emotion appears crookedly. That interested me, but it did not always grip me. There were moments when I admired what it was trying to do more than I truly enjoyed what I was watching.
As an adaptation of a famously difficult novel, I understand the risk and value it. You can feel Noah Baumbach trying to preserve that sense of a saturated world, of American neurosis, of contemporary fear mixed with absurd comedy. And visually there is a lot of care: the colors, sets, costumes, framing and eighties artificiality are very well built. But all that machinery does not always find a strong emotional center.
In the end, it remains for me an interesting, strange film that is stimulating at times, but also uneven and somewhat exhausting. I do not see it as a masterpiece or as a disaster. It feels more like a strange artifact, with powerful ideas about the fear of death, consumption, family, information and the noise surrounding us. At times it made me laugh, at times it fascinated me and at times it tired me. A film more valuable for what it attempts than for how fully it succeeds.
What interested me most was that mixture of tones. The family life of Jack and Babette, with their children all talking at once, their overlapping conversations, their everyday fears and their supermarket routines, has something very strange and very recognizable. The film captures well a world full of information, brands, screens, medicines, news and sentences that sound important but vanish into the air. Everybody talks, everybody has an opinion, everybody consumes, but almost nobody really seems to listen.
I liked Adam Driver a lot. His character is both ridiculous and vulnerable: a professor specialized in Hitler who seems very confident in the classroom, but outside it is full of panic, insecurity and fear of disappearing. Driver knows how to move between caricature and anguish, and that sustains much of the film. He is not playing a hero or an admirable intellectual, but a man who has built a huge identity to cover a very basic fragility.
Greta Gerwig also works, although her character seemed more uneven to me. Babette has a buried sadness that grows little by little, and the film is right when it links her to the fear of dying and to that desperate need to find something that can calm the mind. The thing is that I did not always feel the same emotional force in that part. Sometimes it interested me a lot; at other times, it felt as if the film moved too far away from its characters to surrender to the concept.
The airborne toxic cloud section seemed to me one of the best parts. There the film becomes more physical, clearer and more entertaining. That whole block of evacuation, collective fear, contradictory information, cars, families, authorities and invisible threat works as a very strong satire of a society unable to react to disaster without turning it into spectacle, procedure or absurd conversation. When it enters nervous disaster mode, the film has an energy I appreciated.
I also liked its view of consumption. The supermarket is almost a modern church: bright, ordered, full of colors, promises and comfort. The characters seem to find there a kind of artificial peace, as if buying and walking among products could protect them from death. That final musical number, so strange and so apparently out of place, feels like a good summary of the film: everything is absurd, everything is choreographed, everything is artificial, but there is also something hypnotic in that collective foolishness.
The problem is that the whole is very uneven. There are brilliant moments, funny dialogue and a very carefully worked aesthetic, but also stretches where it becomes heavy. The film talks so much, changes register so often and accumulates so many ideas that at times it seems trapped inside its own intelligence. It wants to be satire, family drama, black comedy, literary adaptation, disaster movie and existential reflection all at once. That ambition has merit, but it also makes it scattered.
I completely understand anyone who finds it unbearable. Its humor is strange, its rhythm is uncomfortable and its way of talking about death can seem too intellectualized. It is not a film looking for direct emotion, but a kind of constant noise where emotion appears crookedly. That interested me, but it did not always grip me. There were moments when I admired what it was trying to do more than I truly enjoyed what I was watching.
As an adaptation of a famously difficult novel, I understand the risk and value it. You can feel Noah Baumbach trying to preserve that sense of a saturated world, of American neurosis, of contemporary fear mixed with absurd comedy. And visually there is a lot of care: the colors, sets, costumes, framing and eighties artificiality are very well built. But all that machinery does not always find a strong emotional center.
In the end, it remains for me an interesting, strange film that is stimulating at times, but also uneven and somewhat exhausting. I do not see it as a masterpiece or as a disaster. It feels more like a strange artifact, with powerful ideas about the fear of death, consumption, family, information and the noise surrounding us. At times it made me laugh, at times it fascinated me and at times it tired me. A film more valuable for what it attempts than for how fully it succeeds.
Mini Review: It left me with a strange feeling, but not one of rejection. More like the feeling of having watched an ambitious, bewildering film, at times very funny and at times quite heavy. It is not easy to enter, and I do not think it always works, but it did feel like a proposal with personality. There are moments when it seems like an absurd family comedy, others when it becomes a disaster movie, others when it turns philosophical about the fear of...
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