Summary
A drift of genres and tones that fail to develop and enhance each other, an ambitious gallery of themes, strange characters who are deliberately presented and act in a way that distances the viewer and a successful staging characterize this very American, strange Noah Baumbach movie.
A kind of Woody Allen movie (Adam Driver's character could star in one of his movies) with a lot of production, threadbare and failed, without its grace, and ironically described by its title: white noise.
Review
A blended family (father, university professor, specialist in Hitler, mother, and several children) lives a relatively (and apparently) calm daily life until an external threat turns their lives upside down.
How difficult to analyze this movie. Above all, because I could hardly perceive the virtues and characteristics that critics assign to it.
First of all, I think the director Noah Baumbach wanted to shoot this film as he came up with it. All its effects are deliberate. They say Don DeLillo's 80s novel of the same name (which I didn't read) is unfilmable. And one concludes that there must be some truth to it when looking at this adaptation.
The film is divided into three distinct parts: in the first there is a presentation of the characters and their daily life, in the second, an external threat that abruptly alters that daily life, and in the third, a return to a "normality" disturbed by certain circumstances. That remained hidden in the first and make a crisis.
We could distinguish a combination or alternation of tones and genres: (a supposed) black comedy, satire, catastrophic and apocalyptic cinema, thriller, family and conjugal drama, horror (in this genre the film gives us one of its best and most powerful scenes). But none of these facets is fully developed, nor do they reinforce each other; rather the opposite.
There are also a variety of topics: the ecological disaster just around the corner, the fear of death, the pharmacological panacea, the futility and vanity of universities and their professors, religion, marital problems.
The characters behave out of step with respect to the circumstances they are experiencing, reflecting and discussing them out loud (especially the two professors played by Adam Driver and Don Cheadle) as if they were teaching and philosophizing; Driver's character is Woody Allen-esque, but sadly this is not a Woody Allen movie. A feeling of estrangement distances the viewer from the characters and their experiences. Let's say that a white noise signal contains all the sound frequencies and all of them show the same power, with a flat result. The same phenomenon occurs with white light, hence the name. This may refer to how the characters in the story perceive and calibrate the circumstances they experience. But also to the result of the film...
Perhaps the interesting character and at some decisive point in the story is that of the wife and mother (a very good performance by Greta Gerwig), whose tangential role at the same time functions as the guiding thread of the story; her "modesty" and her circumstance are the table to cling to in order to navigate the film.
Finally, a special mention for the very good soundtrack by Danny Elfman, with a style far from the usual in his music. Elfman told Variety that Baumbach asked him: "I want to have an '80s electronic influence, but not overtly specific. Imagine if we combined something between Giorgio Moroder and Tangerine Dream with Aaron Copland".
A drift of genres and tones that fail to develop and enhance each other, an ambitious gallery of themes, strange characters who are deliberately presented and act in a way that distances the viewer and a successful staging characterize this very American, strange Noah Baumbach movie.
A kind of Woody Allen movie (Adam Driver's character could star in one of his movies) with a lot of production, threadbare and failed, without its grace, and ironically described by its title: white noise.
Review
A blended family (father, university professor, specialist in Hitler, mother, and several children) lives a relatively (and apparently) calm daily life until an external threat turns their lives upside down.
How difficult to analyze this movie. Above all, because I could hardly perceive the virtues and characteristics that critics assign to it.
First of all, I think the director Noah Baumbach wanted to shoot this film as he came up with it. All its effects are deliberate. They say Don DeLillo's 80s novel of the same name (which I didn't read) is unfilmable. And one concludes that there must be some truth to it when looking at this adaptation.
The film is divided into three distinct parts: in the first there is a presentation of the characters and their daily life, in the second, an external threat that abruptly alters that daily life, and in the third, a return to a "normality" disturbed by certain circumstances. That remained hidden in the first and make a crisis.
We could distinguish a combination or alternation of tones and genres: (a supposed) black comedy, satire, catastrophic and apocalyptic cinema, thriller, family and conjugal drama, horror (in this genre the film gives us one of its best and most powerful scenes). But none of these facets is fully developed, nor do they reinforce each other; rather the opposite.
There are also a variety of topics: the ecological disaster just around the corner, the fear of death, the pharmacological panacea, the futility and vanity of universities and their professors, religion, marital problems.
The characters behave out of step with respect to the circumstances they are experiencing, reflecting and discussing them out loud (especially the two professors played by Adam Driver and Don Cheadle) as if they were teaching and philosophizing; Driver's character is Woody Allen-esque, but sadly this is not a Woody Allen movie. A feeling of estrangement distances the viewer from the characters and their experiences. Let's say that a white noise signal contains all the sound frequencies and all of them show the same power, with a flat result. The same phenomenon occurs with white light, hence the name. This may refer to how the characters in the story perceive and calibrate the circumstances they experience. But also to the result of the film...
Perhaps the interesting character and at some decisive point in the story is that of the wife and mother (a very good performance by Greta Gerwig), whose tangential role at the same time functions as the guiding thread of the story; her "modesty" and her circumstance are the table to cling to in order to navigate the film.
Finally, a special mention for the very good soundtrack by Danny Elfman, with a style far from the usual in his music. Elfman told Variety that Baumbach asked him: "I want to have an '80s electronic influence, but not overtly specific. Imagine if we combined something between Giorgio Moroder and Tangerine Dream with Aaron Copland".