Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy
Year: 2022
Noah Baumbach has perhaps never done better than Marriage Story, a film that also starred Adam Driver, also released on Netflix, and was also about dysfunctional family. But for some reason, with White Noise, he decided to completely abandon what worked, what made sense, and even his own style, copying Charlie Kaufman instead and hoping everything would work out. Well, it didn’t, and what audiences were left with was maybe the worst movie of 2022. You can’t make a move about everything or it becomes about nothing, and who wants to watch that?
A typical yet bizarre American family works through their daily lives; Jack & Babette have been married multiple times before, they have kids from different marriages, Jack is a professor of Hitler studies, Babette is taking some weird unknown pills, and things are just getting stranger and stranger. And that’s all before a toxic event happens near their home, forcing them to mask up and fear for their health. Even after, events keep getting more out of control, until no one really knows what the point is or what they’re living for anyway.
Baumbach did something bad here; he tried leaping into others’ bodies and inhabiting others’ worlds. He adapted a book, a stole a style, he relied on an actor; this is not what he does best, this is not where his talent lies, and my god the result is horrendous. This movie is about all aspects of life at once, until it’s about nothing at all, just randomness. And it’s also somehow about COVID and mental health and Elvis? Make it make sense. Greta was a wrong casting, Raffey was abysmal, Adam was interesting, but not nearly enough to justify the rest of the film, which was singularly pointless and simply bad.
My rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆