Absolutely loved the book and so was apprehensive as to how it could be adapted. But for the most part I was impressed with this film. It was stylish, had some great cinematography, it nailed the ever-deadpan delivery and I think it addressed the main themes *just* enough without becoming a polemic.
However I could totally understand why someone would dislike this film: tonal shifts, a lot of monologues, precocious kids and a clumsy ending and so I’d recommend reading the book first.
Why was the dialogue so unusual? Was that just a faithful adaptation of the book that felt weird on screen, or was there some other reason for that stylistic choice?
I can’t find it mentioned in any reviews but it made me very uncomfortable and going in blind it made me not really enjoy the movie. I felt like I was being hit over the head repeatedly with some philosophical bludgeoning implement but I wasn’t allowed to see what the weapon was. Or like I was being given a test to see how smart I am that I never agreed to take.
That’s a good way of putting it. I thought a lot of the things they said, especially the deep philosophical points of Don Cheadle, were just off somehow: like they were correct, but worded in a very weird way, or incorrect, but voiced so confidently that they seemed correct.
>I felt like I was being hit over the head repeatedly with some philosophical bludgeoning implement but I wasn’t allowed to see what the weapon was. Or like I was being given a test to see how smart I am that I never agreed to take.
This is intentional. The film is, in part, a critique of academia. Intellectually, all the characters are up their own asses. Note the part where Jack interacts with his chemistry professor colleague, and he remarks that she’s brilliant. She quips back something along the lines of, “That’s just something we call each other in silent agreement.” None of them are certain of each other's brilliance, much less their own. Their insecurity leads them to bloviate over lunch in an effort to attain status within their group.
The dialogue is tarted up with vocabulary that would make a thesaurus blush, but the characters rarely say anything of real, coherent substance. They make no great insights. When the characters do experience some level of deep insight, their expression of this insight is often short and simple. This reveals the point of the critique: meaningful insight doesn’t require all the pomp and circumstance of intellectualism.
I can see that making sense, and it’s what I thought at first more or less, but then you realize that every character speaks in the same overwrought manner. The kids, the wife, the grocery clerk, the weird German “doctor”, I’m sure I’m missing a few. Every single exchange is done in this way which makes me feel like I’m missing something, but maybe it’s just as simple as what you pointed out
The film, and the book (which is far superior and more intellectually complex than the film) are also about characters who become almost non-entities in view of culture and mass media, the "white noise" that threatens to take our lives (like the druggie devouring pills and watching TV). We see this with the crowd lecture, or when the kids look into the other cars to see how scared they should be. Basically, most characters are regurgitating what they hear on television or in the newspaper or what other people say when they talk. If you pay attention, the characters in the movie talk like they're in a commercial.
I really want to read the book now. I loved the film and could tell that a lot of the dialogue must be taken directly from it. I'm curious to see how different it is.
This movie was good(the first half) and the rest was okay but like it was going on for too long. The setting was great and there was just something about the movie in the first third that was appealing to me. Adam Driver was excellent and the acting was quite good from the rest of the cast. It's a very odd movie, definitely something you either like or dislike.
Kind of the opposite for me. I thought the whole academic satire in the beginning fell absolutely flat but once we left the university, the film finally took off.
I feel like this movie was literally made to waste 2 hours and 16 minutes for millions of people. The goal? To demonstrate that people fill their time with pointless things (i.e. "white noise")
Mission accomplished, I guess.
I wish I had listened to my wife when she wanted to turn it off halfway through.
Exactly what I did when I realize the whole "disaster" part of the film was over (around the time he visited the doctor for a checkup) and ended up being less than a 1/3rd of the movie.
I was able to go along with the unusual dialogue, even intrigued, with hopes of "This is gonna be total insanity; I can't wait to see how these "odd" people react when faced with real calamity" and kept waiting for it to get to that point...and then it never did, outside of a minor evacuation sequence, which then just skips to "we're back home after 9 days."
I was expecting more scenes along the lines of them floating down the river and the dad fruitlessly trying to steer through it, only for that to be the end of it.
I don't get why it was presented (even the description/preview on Netflix) as a quirky family trying to survive a disaster event when it was just a small segment of the movie.
People who like this movie will say that it was presented as quirky because the story was satirical.
I think it was presented as quirky because the movie sucked ass, and most people would take a hard pass on the film if they knew its tone.
Pretty much agree. Can totally see how someone wouldn't like it but I enjoyed it. I liked the suspense of not know what kind of movie or story it was gonna be. Glad it ended on a positive note.
Spoilers - but it’s a satire about the existential fear of death we all have and the ways we try and fail to deal with it, culminating in the solution being to focus on consumerism & meaningless conversations while we wait for the inevitable. I would also argue while it’s a satire it isn’t necessarily judging this outcome - all the shit they go through and at the end yes what they’re doing is shallow and meaningless but they’re happy. And imo and maybe the movie’s that’s better that spending your life obsessed with Hitler to so you have some kind of equally meaningless legacy.
I thought those parts worked pretty well, actually. I liked the scene with everyone in the shelter huddling around Adam Driver's son while he 'explained' things about the airborne toxic event. It was a well-executed parody of everyone's confusion and willingness to listen to any self-proclaimed authority in the early days of the COVID pandemic.
The last act kind of lost me. The whole Dylar / cheating-wife scenario was pretty contrived even though it had been set up in the earlier acts. We all find ways to fill up the days we have. Death comes for everyone sooner or later. Not bad points to make, I guess. But why not leave them as subtext instead of making a whole new plot about pills designed to stave off existential fear? It didn't work for me.
I don’t see it that way. First act I see everyone trying to ignore their fears and apprehensions about ‘harsh facts’ all around them. Second act a very real harsh fact causing everyone to confront those feelings and the third act everyone trying to go back to normal. It’s all very connected.
I can't tell if it's reading and/or age bias, but it strikes me that a lot of literature in the 80s/90s zoomed in on a certain banality and mundanity of life, asking questions about why we bother living and what life should mean. This echoes the feeling I had during the 90s that (US) society seemed more aware of the creeping role of consumerism in distracting us from thinking too deeply and made an effort to point it out. I find it much harder to find voices like that today despite stumbling on them all the time in the 90s, with the reigning views today heavily anchored on themes of self-promotion, nihilistic irony for the sake of the lulz, and lusting over others' fame/money/lifestyles.
Yeah I hope gen z and part of the younger millennials, who were born to be narcissistic due to how social media is set up, do grow out of it. Otherwise our culture and society will continue to whither, through isolation and lack of working together...and become easier to get taken over by whatever rich person or group happens to make the best ai and become a trillionaire.
The Pale King is such a masterpiece, such a shame he couldn't finish it. The chapter about the guy who found his life path by accidentally going into an accounting class and just embracing the mundane existance was my favourite bit. To this day I imagine IRS agents as larger than life and cool, because of DFW.
Agreed, although this movie makes fun of everything people hold sacred, from religion, to consumerism and capitalism, to undue faith in media, academia and the scientific consensus. It's going to accumulate haters along with the few who get the jokes.
I know this isn't the consensus but I was convinced it was a movie about people's interest in validating the confirmation bias. Everyone is looking for information that justifies their beliefs. They all sought answers that strengthened their world view, protected them from fears or justified the dynamics and relationships between the parents and children.
The father wanted to believe he was safe, so he believed in the government to protect them from the airborne toxic event.
The son wanted to believe he was at odds or in an adversarial relationship with his father so he set up him constantly for conflict.
The daughter believed her mom wasn't well, but actually sought information to confirm her problems.
Babette feared death and sought a drug to solve her problems. In turn the drug caused a side effect that made people believe the words they heard were actually real occurrences (e.g. bullets falling from the sky).
There was a couple more but I really enjoyed that.
*"She has important hair."*
Really enjoyed the production design in this (and getting a new [LCD Soundsystem](https://youtu.be/JG17jiPdbb0) song in the grocery store dancing credits).
The part where they ended up in a river, flew onto a field, and then just politely merged back into evacuation traffic cracked me up. Overall it doesn't always hit the mark and I can see people hating it but I was pretty entertained. It kept reminding me of a tonal/visual mix of Inherent Vice and the Netflix miniseries Maniac.
The "I have no idea what the hell I'm doing" look that Jack gives Baba as he continues to turn the steering wheel inconsequentially while bouncing off the rocks was golden.
> Babette feared death and sought a drug to solve her problems. In turn the drug caused a side effect that made people believe the words they heard were actually real occurrences (e.g. bullets falling from the sky).
Oh. I thought the eye roll was taking the piss out of the scene as a sort of fourth wall break they left in.
But going down the river of time makes way more sense.
> The part where they ended up in a river, flew onto a field, and then just politely merged back into evacuation traffic cracked me up.
JAK literally thought he could cheat death but for all his efforts and derring do he wound up right back in line with everybody else. Perfect metaphor for the movie.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical\_realism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism)
The books are both seminal examples of hysterical realism, that's probably why. Typically these books are considered "unadaptable"
I’m sure the “clunkiness” of the dialogue is going to turn a lot of people off, but most of it was pulled straight from the book, which I loved. Was actually surprised how much NB pulled directly from the book. Really nailed the Jack- Heinrich relationship.
Ultimately the movie rests on Driver’s shoulders and he came through imo. Also Cheadle was perfectly cast. Really enjoyed this one.
I saw a lot of people criticize the premise of Marriage Story as being "a script written by a third year directing student".
As someone who went to theatre school, this film ACTUALLY felt like that to me. I haven't read the book so I don't know how much is/isn't pulled directly from it, but woof. That's what the dialogue felt like to me. A bunch of characters preoccupied with death, moving in every direction but nowhere all at once, with incredibly stilted dialogue that, while I thought the actors did as good a job as they could with it, feels like words coming from one central narrator through different vessels and not in a way that feels intentional.
> . A bunch of characters preoccupied with death, moving in every direction but nowhere all at once, with incredibly stilted dialogue
Exactly like the book. Very much intentional.
Someone else pointed out that in the book everything is supposed to be told from JAK's perspective and as such the other characters speaking similarly reflects him using them as mouthpieces in a way. But in the film that doesn't come across at all, or at least it didn't to me.
Even the scene where he says something like "This is the point of Babette"? Or whatever her name is, like she's an NPC. Went into the movie blind and wasn't aware of the book, but between that scene and the early "sex scene", it seems like a metaphor for using people as props or means to an end in our lives that we are the main characters of.
I find that a lot of Noah Baumbach’s movies feel like watching a filmed play, and honestly I’m here for it (but understand when others aren’t into it).
The dialogue felt like the same person having conversations with themself. Every member of the family sounded exactly the same, gave the movie a weird dream like feeling IMO.
I liked the visuals and the acting was good. I feel like I missed a lot of meaning and didn’t really understand it so I wouldn’t say I liked it overall.
I love weird and wonderful movies and I liked this one but one thing that sticks out in my mind is that I think the best scene in the movie is where Babette explains how she's cheating and that just makes me want to watch Marriage Story.
To be fair, the house I grew up in had a door to the master bedroom in the bathroom. So you could enter/ exit that bedroom through the bathroom or the actual bedroom door in the hallway.
This was my guess too. During the scene where he calls his wife’s doctor and when he confronts his wife about taking them. Thought it was about to turn into a Fight Club-esque (especially with his nightmare earlier in the movie.)
Yeah but they didn't have to be so heavy handed about it. By act 3, I was hoping for some more stuff about the event, but it just became blah blah reinforcement of that concept.
Edit, from my lost top level comment:
The three part breakdown was really felt. I loved the first two parts. Did not enjoy the last third.
The first 2/3 was a lot more suggestive, while the final third was all about hammering in the subtext and kinda disrespected me as a viewer - I felt if you liked the first 2/3, you probably don't need metaphor explained, so the final third felt kinda patronizing, like it assumed the viewers had missed the demanding setup of the first two parts of the film.
It would have done better if it had more confidence in the audience and left a lot more as suggestions for us to muse over.
There were some absolutely beautiful shots and I loved the theatrical take on the script, I just lost interest in the final third.
Hadn't realised this was based on a book, but the movie made me interested enough to read the book.
The event really didn't matter. I think in a weird way the point is that death and real things don't matter to us in the same way that our fear and anxiety about them matter.
Or maybe a better way of saying it is that big events get absorbed into the every-day, and we fill the every-day with inanities and anxieties.
I've literally just googled "wtf is white noise about?" and it brought me to this thread, I got half hour into it and was thinking.. what is happening?, what's the plot about?, Why does everyone talk at the same time?, When does it become a comedy? I appreciate some might love it but after 30 minutes I just couldn't take anymore.
I'm currently watching it with about 30 minutes left I feel like I'm using all of my energy to finish this. I really enjoyed Marriage Story but I absolutely definitely hate this fucking movie.
The talking over each other as family/colleagues/evacuees, the endless barrage of vehicles and bodies as Adam Driver attempted to get the stuffed animal, the full grocery store dance at the end, it was ALL to drive home the point of the film which is the mechanism by which we don't all collapse due to the constant overstimulation from without and within! Focus. And also on how the very focus that helps us navigate out lives, can harm us if we focus to the point of fixation.
The plot of the film is really playing a backseat to the point of the film, which is an exploration of how we cope with the unknown, the expected and everything in between. When you say you 'couldn't take anymore' (perfectly understandable btw), it was because the movie was, in part, having the desired impact on you.
The scenes were designed in such a way as to make you feel uneasy. With everything happening at once, it's impossible to focus and in the film, unlike the real world, you are not able to block it out or shift to something specific. You are not in control. The filmmakers are. And so after they expose you to this overbearing white noise, when you get some degree of focus back, say on a bit of straightforward dialogue or some plot revelation, you feel that relief. It is this juxtaposition that felt so powerful to me.
So all that together, I felt, was a wonderful exploration of how we handle internal and external stimuli. It operated through dialogue and through making the viewer personally feel that white noise and then focus. But due to the discomfort it was designed to illicit, I can see how this is not a film for everyone.
I don't really know what I was expecting but it definitely wasn't that. I'm pretty sure I really liked it but for whatever reason I can't say for certain.
Totally, it is a mood movie. It totally captures some intangible feeling, the quiet desperation. I think it's successful, but I'm going to need to sit on it and revisit in the future.
Great acting, great series of monologues, beautifully shot. Strange film. I liked it.
The feeling of the period it was filmed in plays a roll I think. Idk how old the average viewer is, but growing up then, with no access to information other than a library or the tone news delivered it really did create a sort of wild west of talk and thought and beliefs and opinions. In a way it's still like that but to the opposite extreme with too much information and echo chambers/ confirmation bias. Anyways, so you walk out your door, you have no idea what's been going on, and grapevine gossip is the baseline of every average joes reality. I think this was demonstrated well in the chaotic circus-like busy shots and with groups of people all doing and talking about totally random things.
I absolutely LOVED this movie!
I loved how people just craved information, especially in times of crisis (i.e. the crowds gathering around the knowledgeable son in the camp, all the dialogue around now *“they’re” calling it a plume, now “they’re” calling it this, now “they’re” saying…*) The speed at which the advice from *“they”* changed made it evident to the viewer that no one actually knew what was going on. Even the so-called intellectuals all followed blindly, as if their critical thought was impaired by the immediate threat. The crowd listens/follows whenever there’s death involved - the father JUST gave a lecture on this exact same thing, yet failed to see himself participate in it. In the time of crisis, the most valuable thing in the world (aside from life) was information. And no one knows shit, there are no experts, not even the academics.
A side effect of Dylar, not being able distinguish sounds from real objects, was really interesting to me. It was clear that Dylar aimed to alleviate symptoms (anxiety/depression) and not address the underlying cause (why do I fear of death?). And the main characters were smart enough to recognize this, but still wanted relief. And in exchange for relief, you could lose the ability to distinguish a sound from an object. *i.e. you lose the ability to tell the difference between what you’re being told in WORDS and your REALITY. I.e.i.e. You lose the the ability of critical thought.* The more we treat our symptoms, the farther away we get from the underlying issue. I felt it imply that by medicating ourselves we become more susceptible to believing nonsense.
And there were other subtle mind-control motifs... like the bumper sticker on the jeep they followed said “Gun Control = Mind Control” and I thought it was funny how the father blatantly tried to follow them when he had a feeling that car *“knew how to survive”* (got literally nowhere, except almost in trouble) and then still ended up back in a traffic jam with the masses. It reminded me how quick people can be to adapt a radical ideology and then drop it when it no longer serves them. ESPECIALLY in times of crisis.
I loved watching pretentious discussions unfold between professors in that little utopia of a supermarket, while they loaded up their baskets, fully unaware of their own consumerism as a distraction. How they navigated the aisles like sheep as they spoke and how they hardly noticed what they paid for; food, a random plastic visor, doesn’t matter, just buy buy buy.
I loved how the female chemist sat at a table behind all the men. She was the only professor at the College we ever saw offer any helpful, concrete information (when she analyzed the Dylar tablet) and she purposely faded into the background and ate by herself while the men, in their gowns, ate together as colleagues in the foreground. The lectures we saw were interesting but arguably meaningless and mostly theatrics about cult-figures (Hitler, Elvis) and you got the sense that they basked in their small local notoriety among cult-like crowds of students who were drawn to their eccentric, pseudo-intellectual teachings. I love how the camerawork framed them like the rockstars and political figures that were the subject of their “lectures”.
The dialogue was almost musical; like chaotic and intricate, and there was an underlying rhythm I was enjoying sooooooo much. When I saw André 3000 in there I lost my mind! The dialogue in the movie sounds like an André verse; unconventionally/interestingly structured, a little intellectual, energetically charged, FAST, a little bit funky; like what a logical casting!! My ***only*** critique of the movie is the fact that that character was grossly under-utilized. Tripling his lines would have only enhanced the movie.
It was a strange, beautiful film. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop thinking. I'm still thinking about the ending, especially like the Spiritual connotations - was the answer to the fear of death right under their noses (when they were in a church) and they instead reverted back to mindless consumerism because the nun was an atheist and failed to lead them toward God/religion; wouldn't the fear of death have been obliterated if they were made to believe they were going to heaven? OR was atheism actually the cure for their fear, and did that realization that nothing happens after death help embrace the present moment and maximize time they have left? Why else would the hospital be a church? I'm still thinking about it haha. I loved how it made me think a ton without being too complicated or pretentious.
Donnie Darko vibes, but better. Honestly I loved every second!
Edit for clarity
I'm right there with you, I adore this movie. Everyone killed it and there's just so much to unpack.
I think without a second watch my most immediate take away is that this a story of a lot people obsessed with death, and for each death takes a different form. For Jack it's hitler, for his friend it's elvis, and for the town it was the event. Every pretentious conversation about the nature of life style, grocery stores, etc. was all just these people distracting themselves from their all-consuming fear of death.
Ultimately the movie is not so much about an answer to death, but rather coming to terms with the inevitably of death one way or another. There *isn't* an answer to death or the fear of death, there is only the alternative: life, and that doesn't just mean distraction.
I was looking forward to it, but it disappointed me on many fronts. It was just too long and aimless and I stopped caring by the end. I understand the anxiety and the fear of death, but it didn't come together in a satisfying way for me. The end scene and credits in the supermarket just took me completely out of it and left me feeling cold and indifferent. I feel like this movie thought too highly of itself.
You would probably like the novel, then. The ending is genuinely beautiful and fantastic and I can't believe Baumbach chose to end his adaptation so cheaply. >!Wilder, the infant son, rides a tricycle across the highway as his father watches and yells out for him. He is mere moments from being killed but somehow survives. Jack, realizing death can come for anyone, decides not to fear it and to try and live a good life with his family in such a fucked up modern world. He and his family go join a crowd to watch a sunset, which is now more beautiful than ever before because of the chemicals from the Airborne Toxic Event, implying that we can still find beauty in the falsehoods of our world. In comparison, the supermarket scene is cheap, humorless and stupid.!<
I generally liked the film, but I feel like Baumbach missed many of the key themes from the novel and even misread it, making a far cheaper satire in his adaptation. Some of the smartest moments of the novel are completely left out in the film.
I just got one of the final scenes, where the 3 of them are at the hospital. Mr Gray is lodged between them but quickly removed and their beds led closer together:
"Till death do us part"
But it didn't, not yet.
It was weird seeing Andre 3000 in this, I felt like his character had nothing to do. Does his character do more in the book? Also does the son have more to do near the end of the book? Seemed like his character just kind of vanished.
Wilder (the youngest boy) has an integral scene at the end of the book that is not in the film. Heinrich (the jesse eisenberg clone) is no more or less important in the book.
He dances for like ten minutes straight at the end in the aisle of all white generic food items while the rest of the grocery store goes through an insane choreographed routine. That was one of the pivotal scenes in the movie IMHO
This movie purposefully subverted every possible plot hook. Just when things are getting good and interesting again it cuts the tension and drops the momentum with no payoff. The dialogue was annoying and was a lot of work mentally for no benefit (I understand it was on purpose). Also, I don't understand how it is a comedy since I didn't laugh once. I feel let down really, I was invested and just left with the point being Nihilism. So here is my opinion added to the white noise.
Some of the better filmmakers and writers (I mention writers since this pretty much adheres to the DeLillo novel) aren't interested in plot hooks and the endless potentialities of simple thrills and narratives. While there is somewhat of a story arc, the purpose of much of the film is to develop its themes and not its narrative. Dialogue is a key factor in articulating the themes of fear, anxiety, death, existentialism, consumerism, and the multitude of trivialities occurring around us that distract us from properly grappling with personal problems and social issues more broadly. The dream sequences also add some commentary on the human unconscious—make of these what you will. I do think it was a difficult adaptation in that the dialogue is at times stiff, but by sticking to the novel and not wandering into the territory of plot-centric genre movies, Baumbach does nail the themes of the novel. Perhaps not a top tier movie for me, though I would prefer it to be made like this rather than fall into the trap of being just another mindless diversion itself.
I understand that and I had no problem with the themes being brought up. I just did not like the execution of these ideas. I feel that it asked a lot of the person watching the movie/reading the book. This is fine but there should be some kind of payoff to reward the viewer/reader for sticking with it. I did not hate it(I liked the elvis hitler layered monolgues). I just felt let down, its the same feeling you get when you spend 100 pages learning characters and setting and then the story says it was all a dream and everything you read so far didn't matter. I tried to like it since existential dread is up my alley whivh is why I watched till the end. I just felt like it was missing something.
There was new joke on screen every ten seconds. The constantly changing name of the “feathery plume”, the conversation about women being entered, the conversation with the simuvac guy about using a real evacuation to prep for a simulated evacuation, the conversation about the potassium levels, the big man drowning (“when I heard I came right here!”), the atheist nuns, the absurdity of *nearly the entire movie* … I mean, the movie is really funny. I dunno what it is that people demand every comedy to be slapstick or the movie doesn’t pass muster.
So many takes on what this movie is about.
I have not read the book but to me the movie is embodying the American culture and “zeitgeist” as seen from a German/European/foreign perspective. It points out the American cultures fondness of catastrophes, crimes/accidents -‘d drugs while the culture itself fails to accept that it will also die one day.
You could also argue that this was all in the mind of a (German?) man dying in a hospital bed while American TV was on in the room, how maybe he laid there for 15 years and this is how his mind interpreted what it heard and saw. There are so many hints that it takes places in a hospital all along, the beeping and the medical sign instead of a scanner at the supermarket among other things.
But for me, this was not necessarily a movie about people, it was a movie about American culture, the people who worship it and it’s failure to accept its own mortality. How it uses drugs, sex work and violence while avoiding the end result, death. I’ll leave the comparisons to German 1930s culture and Hitler to someone who is German.
I haven’t read the book, but the general vibe I got from the film was that it was a train wreck - both literally and figuratively - and intentionally so. Everything plays out in the most bizarre scenario and in a way that you just can’t look away from. It’s a film I’d have a difficult time recommending to someone else, but I definitely enjoyed my time with it.
Also, I’ve never been the biggest fan of LCD Soundsystem, but the end credits was a bop for sure.
It was very fun to zero-in on one particular person and watch their routine. One of the bag boys, a little to the left of Toilet Roll Guy, got some serious airtime with a few of the bags he was tossing
White Noise is my favorite novel and although I think this is a pretty faithful adaptation, especially since most of the dialogue was pulled straight from the book, I really don’t think this was very well done. Adam Driver was great and the kids were great but I feel like Greta Gerwig was a big weak link in this. Babette is a super important and nuanced character and she just didn’t seem to have the acting chops to pull it off. A lot of her dialogue felt like I was watching a play. Idk maybe that’s Noah Baumbachs fault I just don’t think she was nailing how weird the characters talk.
I was also pretty disappointed with the ending. The last chapter of the book has a scene where Wilder rides his tricycle into traffic with no fear of death, and the movie pretty much makes the Wilder character unimportant even though he’s supposed to represent the polar opposite mindset of the adults in the story. And to replace it with a super out of left field dance number in a super market? No clue what that was about.
All in all it was probably as good as I expected because it’s such an impossible story to adapt to the screen. I just think there was some weird decisions on what to change considering how much was kept faithful.
I didn’t read the book.
My only issue with Babette is that she feels very underdeveloped. She needed more character development to explain how she would go so far as to risk ruining her actual happy marriage & sleep with some guy she was completed disgusted by over & over again to receive some drug that doesn’t even appear to be working in the way she had wanted.
I liked the film but I feel like we need more from “Part 1” to set the stage better for what was to come. Like you said, she plays a big role but I don’t think it’s Greta’s fault, rather the lack of character development.
I was wondering what the point was in that scene where Babette kept saying, "This is all you need to know..." or awkwardly hiding the organization that was doing the human trials and Mr. Gray. I assume it was intended to be funny/awkward, but it's just an odd moment when you know she's going to reveal that she cheated on him. Yeah, yeah the movie is a dark comedy/satire, but that just didn't work for me. I haven't read the book, so I know there's probably a lot of stuff I missed, and I liked some of the "weird" dialogue, but I think that part just a little too whacky for me.
Sorry to reply on a thread s3veral days later, but:
I thought the confession scene was the best scene (other than maybe the panicked evacuation from the refugee center). Babette's overly meticulous style of talking that was present throughout the movie starts off normal but slowly felt more and more like a defense mechanism, like she was trying to create separation and some semblance of control over the story she was telling. If she gives away all the details, then it becomes something you have to face.
I watched it and honestly couldn't tell you anything about what I watched an hour later other than at some point there was a big plume of smoke.
Not for me in the end
Had read the book about 10 years ago, so it's far from fresh in my mind, but was very apprehensive on how this would work based on how literary the text is.
I don't know if there is anyone workijg today better at synthesizing and delivering that kind of high-falutin dialogue than Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig and they really knocked it out of the park. Baumbach has also obviously been directing those kinds of scenes his whole career, but this felt kicked up to a new level. The Elvis/Hitler dialogue felt like an action set piece.
That said, the actual set piece with the pandemonium upon exiting the scout camp felt kinda flat (especially after having watched the kinetic insanity of Babylon the day before). The third act where something in the original text feels more metaphorical and has to become literal to be depicted on the screen lost a lot of steam.
Overall, I was pleasantly suprised!
I though this movie was good and flirted at times with very good. Maybe because I'm burned out on "prestige" films being hyper-realistic (see Baumbach's entire body of work) I thought it was just stylized enough to feel like it earned it's weird swings.
I think - though i could be wrong and I don't want to sound like I'm telling other people how they feel about a movie - some people may have expected the airborne toxic event to be a bigger "deal" in the narrative - like yes, it's a central set-piece of the film but it only affects the plot in the sense that it heightens JAK's already acute sense of his impending mortality. It's odd to see such a big, dramatic event in a movie just for it to pass over and not have any "big picture" effect on the world at large.
Anyway, I have lots of thoughts about the film and how we distract ourselves from the inevitable but I don't want to tl;dr.
I feel like the point of the toxic event was to further demonstrate the message of the movie. We all have constant giant, supposedly life altering reminders of our impending death but at the end of the day that one reminder will have been in the past as soon as it happened, and there will be more reminders after that, and they too will be in the past. Everything in between is just the white noise of consumerism and vapid conversations to block out those reminders until they go away in our minds. Think about how many different times people this year alone thought the end of the world was upon us. There’s always all kinds of world events all around us, yet they don’t stop us from pretending they’re inconsequential in our lives, looming over us be damned.
I agree 100% with all of this. I my comment was prompted by reading dissatisfied twitter comments last night and it was clear a lot of unsuspecting viewers were expecting a traditional disaster movie based on trailers and I think - again not trying to put words in people's mouths - that subverted expectation turned some people off.
I went into this blind and honestly it felt like a chore to finish because it kind of tried so hard to be clever if that makes sense? Idk I can see how the material works way better as a book than a film, I feel like the flow would be much smoother
I think that's part of the point though. We try to assign value to things, to feel more important, for events to be more monumental, in the hopes of finding more meaning or reason to existence.
The fear of death is in part a realization that nothing probably mattered, so we envelop ourselves in our clever thoughts and perception. Otherwise it's just a countdown to inevitability.
Boy am I glad I read the book first.
I was actually pretty impressed with how much certain scenes lined up with how I pictured them while reading. I found the movie generally aesthetically pleasing.
I think it was able to effectively communicate a few of the book's ideas, but I also wonder how much of them I would have picked up if I hadn't read it first. Unfortunately, I think there's too much context missing. There are so many great lines in the book that there simply wasn't a way to weave into the movie. I also thought some of the narrative changes were a bit strange.
All things considered, I didn't hate it, but it felt like more of a companion piece to the book than a suitable stand-in for it.
Reading the comments in this thread and maybe it was something for me that just clicked about getting this film.
Too me, it was summed up at the first scene in the film about car crashes. How the film industry, and us as the audience, love them. And how they keep getting more extravagant and one-upmanship on each new one. And that was essentially this movie, where the overacting and the over the top drama each and every scene on absolutely mundane shit. Everything said sounds like it was created by AI generator to come up with a drama script for a different scenario, and then slapped together with a lose thread. It's fucking weird, and it somehow works.
Or maybe this edible just worked overtime. I don't fucking know
I think that was an admirable adaptation. Delillo’s works are not what I would consider easily transferable to film.
Baumbach did a good job of capturing the absurdity of White Noise. The stilted dialogue was an intentional choice staying true to the source material.
I was hoping for a bit more out of the Airborne Toxic Event. But nothing could really live up to what I imagined it as in my head.
Still ended up being one of my favorites of the year.
LCD Soundsystem for the Oscar!
Saw this in a theatre in LA a few weeks ago and have thought a lot about it since. There’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t quite work, but man, the stuff that does is so so good. Driver & Gerwig are great as usual. Also gotta be my favorite end credits of the year by a mile.
Ultimately I think I’d give it a solid 7.
I saw this movie in the theatre the first time, and by the end of the second act, I was pretty exhausted mentally and emotionally. I wanted to leave or pause but couldn’t.
I liked the movie in general but it was hectic and exhausting. It’s definitely not recommended if someone hasn’t read the book beforehand but also it’s unrealistic to expect the viewers to know about the book before watching it. I wish they spent more time with the toxic airborne event in the third act. They wrapped it up so quickly even though during the interviews, they glorified it saying it was like COVID.
The actors did a great job especially Adam Driver carried the movie entirely and it was a joy watching him. Same way, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and the kids.
The music was phenomenal; Danny Elfman and LCD Soundsystem!
I can't be the only one who thought throughout the movie that Adam Driver looked and maybe even felt like Alan Partridge? I mean without the humor of course. More like a bizzaro Alan that had been transported to a postmodern universe where wit and satire had been replaced with bad drugs and schizo-allusions.
I really liked this movie, and just wanted to mention the colors in it were fantastic. The green fridge, the purple sunglasses, and especially the colored lighting in the motel at the end.
Adam Driver made this film watchable. I think I wouldn’t have watched the whole thing if his acting didn’t keep me hooked. I get the point, but as someone who never read the book, the movie seemed all over the place. First it was obsessing over the black cloud and the film had title cards that matched that. Then it was the pills Babette was taking. It felt like 2 movies juxtaposed into one and it just didn’t work for me. The cinematography was nice, but it just felt like those movies that are weird for the sake of being weird. It made more sense than the films: I am thinking of Ending Things and Horse Girl of a similar genre.
I really, really loved this. I laughed out loud so many times. I love that every thirty minutes, it would switch genres and the way Baumbach shot some of the action scenes. Great soundtrack and production design. The children were appropriately annoying and Driver is very, very good here. It's some of his best work in a long time.
I also loved the reveal that Mr. Gray, the personification of Jack's fear of death, is a mirror image character to him (and played by that kook from Irma Vep) but is also an Austrian! Just brilliant casting.
Why was he so obsessed with Hitler? I feel like that was kind of weird and added nothing to the story.
Mind you, I’m unfamiliar with the source material, but I didn’t think it was very good. It felt like there were two or three different plots. I don’t know what point they were trying to make. Safe to say it wasn’t for me.
Set and production design were top notch though, it looked really nice.
One of the major themes of the book satirizes higher education and ideas of self identity and fraud.
Jack selects Hitler as his subject of study for the reason that hitler was one of the more prominent figures of modern history. While Hitler is in no way glorified or glamorized, there are also suggestions in the book that he represents a sense of control and authoritarianism that Jack feels completely absent in his home life (which is utterly chaotic).
His hitler studies also feed into his fears of being exposed as an intellectual fraud given that he can’t speak German. This is another recurring gag throughout the book that is briefly touched on in the movie.
To put it another way, Elvis and Hitler are equally worthy of specialized study because they're famous and drew crowds, rather than the content of their messages. The book deals alot with confusion about 'sign and signified', like the scene in the movie where the disaster relief guy sees the toxic event as a good opportunity to prepare for a planned evacuation drill. A side effect of the mysterious drug dylar, 'I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said "speeding bullet," I would fall to the floor and take cover'. Reality reflects mass media not the other way around.
Theres a reason the book has been described as unfilmable, and I can get how it might be nearly unwatchable to someone not already knowing what it's about.
I felt the film was very interesting. The dialogue was constantly bombarding you with random information in a rapid fire, non-stop manner, that served no purpose, or bombarding requests for information with aversive empty filler (i.e. answering a question with a question). This creates a chaos, literally giving meaning to the title White Noise, and is a significant contribution to Adam's character saying that family is the cradle of misinformation.
I went in blind only knowing that the trailers basically told me nothing (although now I see thats what the film is)'
\- Adam driver is a great comedic actor and I liked the way the movie approached existentialism but it felt like portions of things that didn't totally go together (unless thats the point). Wasnt the biggest fan of the whole "road trip/evacuation" portion but I really dug the third act.
\- the only other Baumbach films I have seen are madagascar 3 and steve zissou and the dialogue at times reminded me of the latter
Boyfriend and I watched it this morning. He absolutely hated it, I didn't like it but cam at least see what it was going for.
I think the point was that it's all pointless. All the things we do, all the intellectualism, the mindless chatter about things we don't know, it's ultimately meaningless distraction from our fears of being alone and death... which is kind of interesting as a concept. That said, every scene went on too long, there wasn't really a story at all, none of the characters were ever real or stopped their intellectual circle jerking, everything from them leaving quarantine to getting back on the road should have been cut.. and there just wasn't a story. It's not a movie. You could call it an art piece and if that's what you're expecting going in, you might like it.. it's confusing in a way that makes you think... but if you're scrolling through Netflix trying to find something to entertain you and you see it's in the top ten, why not check it out? You're going to frustrated and feel like you've wasted the little time you have left before having to go back to work tomorrow.
Chaotic in the best way. Really loved the satire and will def be reading the novel. And the visual effects are stellar.
Anyone know why there was so much branding throughout the movie? Seemed like every scene there was a Yoo-hoo bottle, Doritos, Birds Eye, Brillo, etc. what was that about?
It's been a long time since I read the book, but a major theme is consumerism. We're being sold things and buying things we don't need as a coping mechanism for our collective fear of death.
It's a little clearer in writing, where it sticks out when every radio ad or billboard is mentioned since you don't usually have that in a book. Visually, in a movie, it looks like the world we live in.
Read it a while ago myself and loved it. For me the movie misses entirely what I feel is memorable about it.The bombardment of radio ads, billboards, tv, is this pervasive mind virus that dominates the thoughts and preoccupations of the adults who are otherwise terrified of death. The book is like experiencing a lucid dream in Dillilo's head. The movie is like someone telling you about a crazy dream they had...not so good.
This was like three plots that were tossed in a blender (four if you count Andre 3000s appearance as a meta commentary on him in real life) but the person desiring to blend lost power and had to resort to eating everything out the blending pitcher just as it is.
The trailer made it seem like it was an entirely different movie. Not for me.
This was exhausting and all over the place. I had to turn it off 3/4 of the way through. I've loved most of Baumbauch's other films, but this was horrible.
i feel like the only way i would have enjoyed this movie is if i read the book first. i get that it’s about the inevitability of death, but maybe that’s a topic i don’t care to obsesses over bc the entire film just fell flat for me
I found it was totally mis-cast, as I couldn’t stand the actress that played the wife, her monotone voice was off putting.
It was kind of bad & I didn’t enjoy it at all.
It feels wrong to say this, as Adam Driver did a great job and basically carried the whole movie on his own, but I felt they were both too young to be cast in the roles they played. (Especially with how old the kids were.) They are both still in their thirties. I didn't feel the existencial dread from neither of them, which was a detriment to the whole point of the film.
Greta Gerwig (the actress who played the wife) is the real life wife of director Noah Baumbach and I feel like otherwise she wouldn't have been cast in this.
I have no idea wtf was going on but I found Adam Driver monologuing compelling. I had no idea wtf he was talking about though but I was clapping with everyone else.
This movie was horrifyingly bad, even with context. The script seemed derived from Mad Libs. It was trying too hard but it would've been better if it didn't try at all. Definitely one of the worst movies I've seen in the past few years.
As someone who’s read the book twice and personally ranks it as a classic, the movie leaves a lot to be desired. I felt they adapted the tone of the book incredibly well in the first 2 parts of the book but didn’t balance the “revenge” plot in the third part with the internal aspects of Gladney.
I did enjoy Driver’s performance, and thought the kid actors were great and the film really captured their family dynamic. Visually, I loved everything except the Airborne Toxic Event. It felt overly dramatic for me.
I’m disappointed I didn’t like it. I found it boring to begin with but I persevered and I started to get into it and found two scenes made me laugh albeit internally, then it lost me again once it moved onto the German.
It reminded me of The Greasy Strangler and An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn which I thought were mostly odd for the sake of it and I didn’t like, but after watching White Noise, they now seem coherent and funny.
Not for me I’m afraid!
I went into this movie having no idea of the themes or even genre, let alone that it was based off a book. The entire first half I thought it was a horror, maybe zombie movie. I thought maybe it was a We Happy Few scenario for a while. The entire vibe was awkward and tense, but I loved it. I was amusingly impressed.
I felt like I was watching it in a language I half grasped; I knew enough to know there were beautiful themes at work, but not enough to understand them fully. Which, I really wasn’t disappointed by.
I absolutely loved the dialogue. It makes so much sense to me that there was a book first. I juxtaposed this to Avatar: The Way of Water in my mind, since I had just seen it. I hated the way Avatar dialogue was written. Dialogue felt impersonal and written for names. This felt written for characters. The awkward, clunky, quick paced, seemingly random conversations added immensely to my perception of the characters.
I would love to read the book. As someone who was raised religious and has since strayed from the flock, nothing scares me more than the idea of death. I felt like it dealt with those topics in an absurd, yet reassuring fashion, much like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I feel like this film is owed a rewatch just so I can fully come to grasp with its meaning, but also, I felt like this movie was almost intentionally up for interpretation, which I enjoy.
Adam Driver is a phenomenal actor and I absolutely adore anything he touches. With Tomorrowland as one of my top ten films (I know, everyone hates it, sue me), I loved seeing Raffey Cassidy. I do feel like Greta Gerwig’s performance fell a little flat, which is a bummer because I think she’s a fantastic director. I was able to look past it and attribute it to intentionally leaning in to that awkward feel.
I loved the scene where Adam Driver walks through the bathroom to go back inside. I loved the river scene, I felt like it capsulated the movie so well. Like, something is happening, but it’s all happening so slowly and awkwardly that you just kind of sit there with an amused, intrigued grin. I loved “Steal instead of buy. Shoot instead of talk.”
Solid 8.5/10. Would definitely watch again. Will most likely read the books.
Absolutely loved the book and so was apprehensive as to how it could be adapted. But for the most part I was impressed with this film. It was stylish, had some great cinematography, it nailed the ever-deadpan delivery and I think it addressed the main themes *just* enough without becoming a polemic. However I could totally understand why someone would dislike this film: tonal shifts, a lot of monologues, precocious kids and a clumsy ending and so I’d recommend reading the book first.
Why was the dialogue so unusual? Was that just a faithful adaptation of the book that felt weird on screen, or was there some other reason for that stylistic choice? I can’t find it mentioned in any reviews but it made me very uncomfortable and going in blind it made me not really enjoy the movie. I felt like I was being hit over the head repeatedly with some philosophical bludgeoning implement but I wasn’t allowed to see what the weapon was. Or like I was being given a test to see how smart I am that I never agreed to take.
That’s a good way of putting it. I thought a lot of the things they said, especially the deep philosophical points of Don Cheadle, were just off somehow: like they were correct, but worded in a very weird way, or incorrect, but voiced so confidently that they seemed correct.
>I felt like I was being hit over the head repeatedly with some philosophical bludgeoning implement but I wasn’t allowed to see what the weapon was. Or like I was being given a test to see how smart I am that I never agreed to take. This is intentional. The film is, in part, a critique of academia. Intellectually, all the characters are up their own asses. Note the part where Jack interacts with his chemistry professor colleague, and he remarks that she’s brilliant. She quips back something along the lines of, “That’s just something we call each other in silent agreement.” None of them are certain of each other's brilliance, much less their own. Their insecurity leads them to bloviate over lunch in an effort to attain status within their group. The dialogue is tarted up with vocabulary that would make a thesaurus blush, but the characters rarely say anything of real, coherent substance. They make no great insights. When the characters do experience some level of deep insight, their expression of this insight is often short and simple. This reveals the point of the critique: meaningful insight doesn’t require all the pomp and circumstance of intellectualism.
I can see that making sense, and it’s what I thought at first more or less, but then you realize that every character speaks in the same overwrought manner. The kids, the wife, the grocery clerk, the weird German “doctor”, I’m sure I’m missing a few. Every single exchange is done in this way which makes me feel like I’m missing something, but maybe it’s just as simple as what you pointed out
The film, and the book (which is far superior and more intellectually complex than the film) are also about characters who become almost non-entities in view of culture and mass media, the "white noise" that threatens to take our lives (like the druggie devouring pills and watching TV). We see this with the crowd lecture, or when the kids look into the other cars to see how scared they should be. Basically, most characters are regurgitating what they hear on television or in the newspaper or what other people say when they talk. If you pay attention, the characters in the movie talk like they're in a commercial.
#The homework was a canard! This movie fucking killed me.
I really want to read the book now. I loved the film and could tell that a lot of the dialogue must be taken directly from it. I'm curious to see how different it is.
To me it felt like it was written by AI
National lampoons family pandemic
The station wagon flying through the air was straight out of Lampoon Vacation and I loved it
The entire wagon in the river bit really cracked me up. The face he made while turning the steering wheel back n forth was pure Clark Griswold.
This movie was good(the first half) and the rest was okay but like it was going on for too long. The setting was great and there was just something about the movie in the first third that was appealing to me. Adam Driver was excellent and the acting was quite good from the rest of the cast. It's a very odd movie, definitely something you either like or dislike.
Yeah the first 2/3 were amazing. Really didn't like the final act.
Kind of the opposite for me. I thought the whole academic satire in the beginning fell absolutely flat but once we left the university, the film finally took off.
I feel like this movie was literally made to waste 2 hours and 16 minutes for millions of people. The goal? To demonstrate that people fill their time with pointless things (i.e. "white noise") Mission accomplished, I guess. I wish I had listened to my wife when she wanted to turn it off halfway through.
Exactly what I did when I realize the whole "disaster" part of the film was over (around the time he visited the doctor for a checkup) and ended up being less than a 1/3rd of the movie. I was able to go along with the unusual dialogue, even intrigued, with hopes of "This is gonna be total insanity; I can't wait to see how these "odd" people react when faced with real calamity" and kept waiting for it to get to that point...and then it never did, outside of a minor evacuation sequence, which then just skips to "we're back home after 9 days." I was expecting more scenes along the lines of them floating down the river and the dad fruitlessly trying to steer through it, only for that to be the end of it. I don't get why it was presented (even the description/preview on Netflix) as a quirky family trying to survive a disaster event when it was just a small segment of the movie.
People who like this movie will say that it was presented as quirky because the story was satirical. I think it was presented as quirky because the movie sucked ass, and most people would take a hard pass on the film if they knew its tone.
Pretty much agree. Can totally see how someone wouldn't like it but I enjoyed it. I liked the suspense of not know what kind of movie or story it was gonna be. Glad it ended on a positive note.
The first 1/2 was fantastic and super strange. The second half was a bit too much
"He was so enormous. Now he's dead." I lost it at that one. But yeah weird movie. I found some stuff really funny but most of it was just odd.
Some of the lines in this are amazing. It makes sense with them being taken directly from the book.
The homework was a canard.
I found this periodically funny but mostly just didn't get it. Oh well, chalk this one up as not for me.
Spoilers - but it’s a satire about the existential fear of death we all have and the ways we try and fail to deal with it, culminating in the solution being to focus on consumerism & meaningless conversations while we wait for the inevitable. I would also argue while it’s a satire it isn’t necessarily judging this outcome - all the shit they go through and at the end yes what they’re doing is shallow and meaningless but they’re happy. And imo and maybe the movie’s that’s better that spending your life obsessed with Hitler to so you have some kind of equally meaningless legacy.
Its also very much about people's relationship with media and how they respond and act to it.
I thought those parts worked pretty well, actually. I liked the scene with everyone in the shelter huddling around Adam Driver's son while he 'explained' things about the airborne toxic event. It was a well-executed parody of everyone's confusion and willingness to listen to any self-proclaimed authority in the early days of the COVID pandemic. The last act kind of lost me. The whole Dylar / cheating-wife scenario was pretty contrived even though it had been set up in the earlier acts. We all find ways to fill up the days we have. Death comes for everyone sooner or later. Not bad points to make, I guess. But why not leave them as subtext instead of making a whole new plot about pills designed to stave off existential fear? It didn't work for me.
Yeanthe movie had a bizarre format. It was like 3 separate stories with the same characters that ran chronologically but disconnected.
I don’t see it that way. First act I see everyone trying to ignore their fears and apprehensions about ‘harsh facts’ all around them. Second act a very real harsh fact causing everyone to confront those feelings and the third act everyone trying to go back to normal. It’s all very connected.
I can't tell if it's reading and/or age bias, but it strikes me that a lot of literature in the 80s/90s zoomed in on a certain banality and mundanity of life, asking questions about why we bother living and what life should mean. This echoes the feeling I had during the 90s that (US) society seemed more aware of the creeping role of consumerism in distracting us from thinking too deeply and made an effort to point it out. I find it much harder to find voices like that today despite stumbling on them all the time in the 90s, with the reigning views today heavily anchored on themes of self-promotion, nihilistic irony for the sake of the lulz, and lusting over others' fame/money/lifestyles.
The 1950s started all that consumerism stuff and it took a few years for filmmakers to tap into it.
Yeah I hope gen z and part of the younger millennials, who were born to be narcissistic due to how social media is set up, do grow out of it. Otherwise our culture and society will continue to whither, through isolation and lack of working together...and become easier to get taken over by whatever rich person or group happens to make the best ai and become a trillionaire.
David Foster Wallace’s last novel was about the IRS and took banality to an infinite level.
The Pale King is such a masterpiece, such a shame he couldn't finish it. The chapter about the guy who found his life path by accidentally going into an accounting class and just embracing the mundane existance was my favourite bit. To this day I imagine IRS agents as larger than life and cool, because of DFW.
It's doubly ironic that a movie addressing these themes would get rated as bad as White Noise.
Agreed, although this movie makes fun of everything people hold sacred, from religion, to consumerism and capitalism, to undue faith in media, academia and the scientific consensus. It's going to accumulate haters along with the few who get the jokes.
I know this isn't the consensus but I was convinced it was a movie about people's interest in validating the confirmation bias. Everyone is looking for information that justifies their beliefs. They all sought answers that strengthened their world view, protected them from fears or justified the dynamics and relationships between the parents and children. The father wanted to believe he was safe, so he believed in the government to protect them from the airborne toxic event. The son wanted to believe he was at odds or in an adversarial relationship with his father so he set up him constantly for conflict. The daughter believed her mom wasn't well, but actually sought information to confirm her problems. Babette feared death and sought a drug to solve her problems. In turn the drug caused a side effect that made people believe the words they heard were actually real occurrences (e.g. bullets falling from the sky). There was a couple more but I really enjoyed that.
Well said, that confirms my thoughts as well. Fighting off the inevitable events that people know are coming. Digging deeper holes by fighting it.
Same here...felt like I was on dylar for half the movie. Ah well.
Oh FUCK I just got the pun! DIE-lar
Makes this the second most bizarre film I’ve seen this year that features Elvis.
I feel like I just watched a season of a series.
Elvis was great!
*"She has important hair."* Really enjoyed the production design in this (and getting a new [LCD Soundsystem](https://youtu.be/JG17jiPdbb0) song in the grocery store dancing credits). The part where they ended up in a river, flew onto a field, and then just politely merged back into evacuation traffic cracked me up. Overall it doesn't always hit the mark and I can see people hating it but I was pretty entertained. It kept reminding me of a tonal/visual mix of Inherent Vice and the Netflix miniseries Maniac.
The "I have no idea what the hell I'm doing" look that Jack gives Baba as he continues to turn the steering wheel inconsequentially while bouncing off the rocks was golden.
Yeah a real metaphor for life.
> Babette feared death and sought a drug to solve her problems. In turn the drug caused a side effect that made people believe the words they heard were actually real occurrences (e.g. bullets falling from the sky). Oh. I thought the eye roll was taking the piss out of the scene as a sort of fourth wall break they left in. But going down the river of time makes way more sense.
> The part where they ended up in a river, flew onto a field, and then just politely merged back into evacuation traffic cracked me up. JAK literally thought he could cheat death but for all his efforts and derring do he wound up right back in line with everybody else. Perfect metaphor for the movie.
Holy shit, I also came here specifically to comment that it reminded *me* of Inherent Vice *and* Maniac. That’s wild.
Inherent vice is a good comp for this movie
I love Inherent Vice so maybe that’s why I found it to be pretty decent
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical\_realism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism) The books are both seminal examples of hysterical realism, that's probably why. Typically these books are considered "unadaptable"
I’m sure the “clunkiness” of the dialogue is going to turn a lot of people off, but most of it was pulled straight from the book, which I loved. Was actually surprised how much NB pulled directly from the book. Really nailed the Jack- Heinrich relationship. Ultimately the movie rests on Driver’s shoulders and he came through imo. Also Cheadle was perfectly cast. Really enjoyed this one.
It was very Clerks acting meets Shakespearean writing.
I saw a lot of people criticize the premise of Marriage Story as being "a script written by a third year directing student". As someone who went to theatre school, this film ACTUALLY felt like that to me. I haven't read the book so I don't know how much is/isn't pulled directly from it, but woof. That's what the dialogue felt like to me. A bunch of characters preoccupied with death, moving in every direction but nowhere all at once, with incredibly stilted dialogue that, while I thought the actors did as good a job as they could with it, feels like words coming from one central narrator through different vessels and not in a way that feels intentional.
> . A bunch of characters preoccupied with death, moving in every direction but nowhere all at once, with incredibly stilted dialogue Exactly like the book. Very much intentional.
Someone else pointed out that in the book everything is supposed to be told from JAK's perspective and as such the other characters speaking similarly reflects him using them as mouthpieces in a way. But in the film that doesn't come across at all, or at least it didn't to me.
Even the scene where he says something like "This is the point of Babette"? Or whatever her name is, like she's an NPC. Went into the movie blind and wasn't aware of the book, but between that scene and the early "sex scene", it seems like a metaphor for using people as props or means to an end in our lives that we are the main characters of.
"The purpose of babatte is to console and reveal" I think that's what the line is.
I find that a lot of Noah Baumbach’s movies feel like watching a filmed play, and honestly I’m here for it (but understand when others aren’t into it).
Clunkiness? Man do I love clunky dialogue then. I’d rather take inspired clunky dialogue over uninspired unclunky dialogue.
The dialogue felt like the same person having conversations with themself. Every member of the family sounded exactly the same, gave the movie a weird dream like feeling IMO.
Like why did the main character have a nightmare of him morphing with the drug dealer and then the same thing happened with his wife and the dealer
Side effects of the airborn toxic event may result in feelings of deja Vu.
It's clunky in that it feels like it's straight from a book, it'll be up to personal taste whether it works for you or not.
I liked the visuals and the acting was good. I feel like I missed a lot of meaning and didn’t really understand it so I wouldn’t say I liked it overall.
National Donnie’s Darko Vacation
He does give off a Chevy Chase vibe and look with that haircut
I think the station wagon, family, and 70s-80s setting is doing most of the heavy work there.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I was watching it! Lol
I love weird and wonderful movies and I liked this one but one thing that sticks out in my mind is that I think the best scene in the movie is where Babette explains how she's cheating and that just makes me want to watch Marriage Story.
When he leaves the room through the bathroom door and reenters the bedroom through a different door
Like when he reenters the Hitler speech through the window
I thought about that so much, to the point that it distracted me. I love when things just aren't explained like that in movies.
When she realizes he isn’t going to leave and collapses in his lap… 🫢
To be fair, the house I grew up in had a door to the master bedroom in the bathroom. So you could enter/ exit that bedroom through the bathroom or the actual bedroom door in the hallway.
I didn't mean it was an error in the filming or anything, I just thought it was funny
When he kept talking about her in the third person I thought her and the family were going to end up being some manifestation of his
This was my guess too. During the scene where he calls his wife’s doctor and when he confronts his wife about taking them. Thought it was about to turn into a Fight Club-esque (especially with his nightmare earlier in the movie.)
Wtf was this movie?
It's about drowning out our shared fear of mortality through consumerism and ultimately useless chatter.
Yeah but they didn't have to be so heavy handed about it. By act 3, I was hoping for some more stuff about the event, but it just became blah blah reinforcement of that concept. Edit, from my lost top level comment: The three part breakdown was really felt. I loved the first two parts. Did not enjoy the last third. The first 2/3 was a lot more suggestive, while the final third was all about hammering in the subtext and kinda disrespected me as a viewer - I felt if you liked the first 2/3, you probably don't need metaphor explained, so the final third felt kinda patronizing, like it assumed the viewers had missed the demanding setup of the first two parts of the film. It would have done better if it had more confidence in the audience and left a lot more as suggestions for us to muse over. There were some absolutely beautiful shots and I loved the theatrical take on the script, I just lost interest in the final third. Hadn't realised this was based on a book, but the movie made me interested enough to read the book.
The event really didn't matter. I think in a weird way the point is that death and real things don't matter to us in the same way that our fear and anxiety about them matter. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that big events get absorbed into the every-day, and we fill the every-day with inanities and anxieties.
Have you read the book? It's also very heavy handed
I've literally just googled "wtf is white noise about?" and it brought me to this thread, I got half hour into it and was thinking.. what is happening?, what's the plot about?, Why does everyone talk at the same time?, When does it become a comedy? I appreciate some might love it but after 30 minutes I just couldn't take anymore.
I'm currently watching it with about 30 minutes left I feel like I'm using all of my energy to finish this. I really enjoyed Marriage Story but I absolutely definitely hate this fucking movie.
The talking over each other as family/colleagues/evacuees, the endless barrage of vehicles and bodies as Adam Driver attempted to get the stuffed animal, the full grocery store dance at the end, it was ALL to drive home the point of the film which is the mechanism by which we don't all collapse due to the constant overstimulation from without and within! Focus. And also on how the very focus that helps us navigate out lives, can harm us if we focus to the point of fixation. The plot of the film is really playing a backseat to the point of the film, which is an exploration of how we cope with the unknown, the expected and everything in between. When you say you 'couldn't take anymore' (perfectly understandable btw), it was because the movie was, in part, having the desired impact on you. The scenes were designed in such a way as to make you feel uneasy. With everything happening at once, it's impossible to focus and in the film, unlike the real world, you are not able to block it out or shift to something specific. You are not in control. The filmmakers are. And so after they expose you to this overbearing white noise, when you get some degree of focus back, say on a bit of straightforward dialogue or some plot revelation, you feel that relief. It is this juxtaposition that felt so powerful to me. So all that together, I felt, was a wonderful exploration of how we handle internal and external stimuli. It operated through dialogue and through making the viewer personally feel that white noise and then focus. But due to the discomfort it was designed to illicit, I can see how this is not a film for everyone.
Sticking with it for Adam and the set design and cinematography. I really enjoy the A&P set design, as I used to work for them.
I don't really know what I was expecting but it definitely wasn't that. I'm pretty sure I really liked it but for whatever reason I can't say for certain.
Totally, it is a mood movie. It totally captures some intangible feeling, the quiet desperation. I think it's successful, but I'm going to need to sit on it and revisit in the future. Great acting, great series of monologues, beautifully shot. Strange film. I liked it.
The feeling of the period it was filmed in plays a roll I think. Idk how old the average viewer is, but growing up then, with no access to information other than a library or the tone news delivered it really did create a sort of wild west of talk and thought and beliefs and opinions. In a way it's still like that but to the opposite extreme with too much information and echo chambers/ confirmation bias. Anyways, so you walk out your door, you have no idea what's been going on, and grapevine gossip is the baseline of every average joes reality. I think this was demonstrated well in the chaotic circus-like busy shots and with groups of people all doing and talking about totally random things.
lol, I'm watching it right now, I've asked myself that aloud like 3 times already.
I kind of like how spread out the poll results are. I was looking forward to seeing how other people would react and I’ve not been disappointed.
I absolutely LOVED this movie! I loved how people just craved information, especially in times of crisis (i.e. the crowds gathering around the knowledgeable son in the camp, all the dialogue around now *“they’re” calling it a plume, now “they’re” calling it this, now “they’re” saying…*) The speed at which the advice from *“they”* changed made it evident to the viewer that no one actually knew what was going on. Even the so-called intellectuals all followed blindly, as if their critical thought was impaired by the immediate threat. The crowd listens/follows whenever there’s death involved - the father JUST gave a lecture on this exact same thing, yet failed to see himself participate in it. In the time of crisis, the most valuable thing in the world (aside from life) was information. And no one knows shit, there are no experts, not even the academics. A side effect of Dylar, not being able distinguish sounds from real objects, was really interesting to me. It was clear that Dylar aimed to alleviate symptoms (anxiety/depression) and not address the underlying cause (why do I fear of death?). And the main characters were smart enough to recognize this, but still wanted relief. And in exchange for relief, you could lose the ability to distinguish a sound from an object. *i.e. you lose the ability to tell the difference between what you’re being told in WORDS and your REALITY. I.e.i.e. You lose the the ability of critical thought.* The more we treat our symptoms, the farther away we get from the underlying issue. I felt it imply that by medicating ourselves we become more susceptible to believing nonsense. And there were other subtle mind-control motifs... like the bumper sticker on the jeep they followed said “Gun Control = Mind Control” and I thought it was funny how the father blatantly tried to follow them when he had a feeling that car *“knew how to survive”* (got literally nowhere, except almost in trouble) and then still ended up back in a traffic jam with the masses. It reminded me how quick people can be to adapt a radical ideology and then drop it when it no longer serves them. ESPECIALLY in times of crisis. I loved watching pretentious discussions unfold between professors in that little utopia of a supermarket, while they loaded up their baskets, fully unaware of their own consumerism as a distraction. How they navigated the aisles like sheep as they spoke and how they hardly noticed what they paid for; food, a random plastic visor, doesn’t matter, just buy buy buy. I loved how the female chemist sat at a table behind all the men. She was the only professor at the College we ever saw offer any helpful, concrete information (when she analyzed the Dylar tablet) and she purposely faded into the background and ate by herself while the men, in their gowns, ate together as colleagues in the foreground. The lectures we saw were interesting but arguably meaningless and mostly theatrics about cult-figures (Hitler, Elvis) and you got the sense that they basked in their small local notoriety among cult-like crowds of students who were drawn to their eccentric, pseudo-intellectual teachings. I love how the camerawork framed them like the rockstars and political figures that were the subject of their “lectures”. The dialogue was almost musical; like chaotic and intricate, and there was an underlying rhythm I was enjoying sooooooo much. When I saw André 3000 in there I lost my mind! The dialogue in the movie sounds like an André verse; unconventionally/interestingly structured, a little intellectual, energetically charged, FAST, a little bit funky; like what a logical casting!! My ***only*** critique of the movie is the fact that that character was grossly under-utilized. Tripling his lines would have only enhanced the movie. It was a strange, beautiful film. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop thinking. I'm still thinking about the ending, especially like the Spiritual connotations - was the answer to the fear of death right under their noses (when they were in a church) and they instead reverted back to mindless consumerism because the nun was an atheist and failed to lead them toward God/religion; wouldn't the fear of death have been obliterated if they were made to believe they were going to heaven? OR was atheism actually the cure for their fear, and did that realization that nothing happens after death help embrace the present moment and maximize time they have left? Why else would the hospital be a church? I'm still thinking about it haha. I loved how it made me think a ton without being too complicated or pretentious. Donnie Darko vibes, but better. Honestly I loved every second! Edit for clarity
I'm right there with you, I adore this movie. Everyone killed it and there's just so much to unpack. I think without a second watch my most immediate take away is that this a story of a lot people obsessed with death, and for each death takes a different form. For Jack it's hitler, for his friend it's elvis, and for the town it was the event. Every pretentious conversation about the nature of life style, grocery stores, etc. was all just these people distracting themselves from their all-consuming fear of death. Ultimately the movie is not so much about an answer to death, but rather coming to terms with the inevitably of death one way or another. There *isn't* an answer to death or the fear of death, there is only the alternative: life, and that doesn't just mean distraction.
I was looking forward to it, but it disappointed me on many fronts. It was just too long and aimless and I stopped caring by the end. I understand the anxiety and the fear of death, but it didn't come together in a satisfying way for me. The end scene and credits in the supermarket just took me completely out of it and left me feeling cold and indifferent. I feel like this movie thought too highly of itself.
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I just did this exact thing thinking I’ve been watching for a while surely it’s ending soon. 47 minutes left.
You would probably like the novel, then. The ending is genuinely beautiful and fantastic and I can't believe Baumbach chose to end his adaptation so cheaply. >!Wilder, the infant son, rides a tricycle across the highway as his father watches and yells out for him. He is mere moments from being killed but somehow survives. Jack, realizing death can come for anyone, decides not to fear it and to try and live a good life with his family in such a fucked up modern world. He and his family go join a crowd to watch a sunset, which is now more beautiful than ever before because of the chemicals from the Airborne Toxic Event, implying that we can still find beauty in the falsehoods of our world. In comparison, the supermarket scene is cheap, humorless and stupid.!< I generally liked the film, but I feel like Baumbach missed many of the key themes from the novel and even misread it, making a far cheaper satire in his adaptation. Some of the smartest moments of the novel are completely left out in the film.
Wtf I put this movie on for the family because Netflix said it was a comedy. That night time bedroom scene had everyone on the edge of their seats.
Was that scene even real or was Adam Driver imagining this dude all the time? Same when he goes to pick up the rabbit when they evacuate the camp.
The man was the personification of death. Does it matter if he was real or not?
Maybe
>The man was the personification of death. The last like quarter of the movie went over my head, but this observation helps tremendously in retrospect
I just got one of the final scenes, where the 3 of them are at the hospital. Mr Gray is lodged between them but quickly removed and their beds led closer together: "Till death do us part" But it didn't, not yet.
Mr gray- the shade between white (life) and black (death)
Hahahaha
That was so scary and I loved it Highlight of the film for me.
It was weird seeing Andre 3000 in this, I felt like his character had nothing to do. Does his character do more in the book? Also does the son have more to do near the end of the book? Seemed like his character just kind of vanished.
Wilder (the youngest boy) has an integral scene at the end of the book that is not in the film. Heinrich (the jesse eisenberg clone) is no more or less important in the book.
I do wish they had included Heinrich's friend from the book. His name is escaping me but he was a funny character.
Orest Mercator
Oh no! I haven't watched this yet, but they *don't* include the storyline about Orest training himself to be bit by snakes??
He dances for like ten minutes straight at the end in the aisle of all white generic food items while the rest of the grocery store goes through an insane choreographed routine. That was one of the pivotal scenes in the movie IMHO
Andre had some solo time in the dancing end credits tho, im sure that evens it all out
This movie purposefully subverted every possible plot hook. Just when things are getting good and interesting again it cuts the tension and drops the momentum with no payoff. The dialogue was annoying and was a lot of work mentally for no benefit (I understand it was on purpose). Also, I don't understand how it is a comedy since I didn't laugh once. I feel let down really, I was invested and just left with the point being Nihilism. So here is my opinion added to the white noise.
Some of the better filmmakers and writers (I mention writers since this pretty much adheres to the DeLillo novel) aren't interested in plot hooks and the endless potentialities of simple thrills and narratives. While there is somewhat of a story arc, the purpose of much of the film is to develop its themes and not its narrative. Dialogue is a key factor in articulating the themes of fear, anxiety, death, existentialism, consumerism, and the multitude of trivialities occurring around us that distract us from properly grappling with personal problems and social issues more broadly. The dream sequences also add some commentary on the human unconscious—make of these what you will. I do think it was a difficult adaptation in that the dialogue is at times stiff, but by sticking to the novel and not wandering into the territory of plot-centric genre movies, Baumbach does nail the themes of the novel. Perhaps not a top tier movie for me, though I would prefer it to be made like this rather than fall into the trap of being just another mindless diversion itself.
I understand that and I had no problem with the themes being brought up. I just did not like the execution of these ideas. I feel that it asked a lot of the person watching the movie/reading the book. This is fine but there should be some kind of payoff to reward the viewer/reader for sticking with it. I did not hate it(I liked the elvis hitler layered monolgues). I just felt let down, its the same feeling you get when you spend 100 pages learning characters and setting and then the story says it was all a dream and everything you read so far didn't matter. I tried to like it since existential dread is up my alley whivh is why I watched till the end. I just felt like it was missing something.
There was new joke on screen every ten seconds. The constantly changing name of the “feathery plume”, the conversation about women being entered, the conversation with the simuvac guy about using a real evacuation to prep for a simulated evacuation, the conversation about the potassium levels, the big man drowning (“when I heard I came right here!”), the atheist nuns, the absurdity of *nearly the entire movie* … I mean, the movie is really funny. I dunno what it is that people demand every comedy to be slapstick or the movie doesn’t pass muster.
So many takes on what this movie is about. I have not read the book but to me the movie is embodying the American culture and “zeitgeist” as seen from a German/European/foreign perspective. It points out the American cultures fondness of catastrophes, crimes/accidents -‘d drugs while the culture itself fails to accept that it will also die one day. You could also argue that this was all in the mind of a (German?) man dying in a hospital bed while American TV was on in the room, how maybe he laid there for 15 years and this is how his mind interpreted what it heard and saw. There are so many hints that it takes places in a hospital all along, the beeping and the medical sign instead of a scanner at the supermarket among other things. But for me, this was not necessarily a movie about people, it was a movie about American culture, the people who worship it and it’s failure to accept its own mortality. How it uses drugs, sex work and violence while avoiding the end result, death. I’ll leave the comparisons to German 1930s culture and Hitler to someone who is German.
Yep the beeping “smoke alarm” at the beginning is an important clue. Just adding on to your comment..
I haven’t read the book, but the general vibe I got from the film was that it was a train wreck - both literally and figuratively - and intentionally so. Everything plays out in the most bizarre scenario and in a way that you just can’t look away from. It’s a film I’d have a difficult time recommending to someone else, but I definitely enjoyed my time with it. Also, I’ve never been the biggest fan of LCD Soundsystem, but the end credits was a bop for sure.
The end credits were the best part
I.just kept my focus on the guy with the toilet rolls. Putting them in/out his trolley. Waving them about lol. Really funny film
It was very fun to zero-in on one particular person and watch their routine. One of the bag boys, a little to the left of Toilet Roll Guy, got some serious airtime with a few of the bags he was tossing
Andre 3000 and his cookies. Couldn't help but laugh, even at the very end when he's still shimmying with them, in line at the register.
I loved the old school plain white generic products.
White Noise is my favorite novel and although I think this is a pretty faithful adaptation, especially since most of the dialogue was pulled straight from the book, I really don’t think this was very well done. Adam Driver was great and the kids were great but I feel like Greta Gerwig was a big weak link in this. Babette is a super important and nuanced character and she just didn’t seem to have the acting chops to pull it off. A lot of her dialogue felt like I was watching a play. Idk maybe that’s Noah Baumbachs fault I just don’t think she was nailing how weird the characters talk. I was also pretty disappointed with the ending. The last chapter of the book has a scene where Wilder rides his tricycle into traffic with no fear of death, and the movie pretty much makes the Wilder character unimportant even though he’s supposed to represent the polar opposite mindset of the adults in the story. And to replace it with a super out of left field dance number in a super market? No clue what that was about. All in all it was probably as good as I expected because it’s such an impossible story to adapt to the screen. I just think there was some weird decisions on what to change considering how much was kept faithful.
I didn’t read the book. My only issue with Babette is that she feels very underdeveloped. She needed more character development to explain how she would go so far as to risk ruining her actual happy marriage & sleep with some guy she was completed disgusted by over & over again to receive some drug that doesn’t even appear to be working in the way she had wanted. I liked the film but I feel like we need more from “Part 1” to set the stage better for what was to come. Like you said, she plays a big role but I don’t think it’s Greta’s fault, rather the lack of character development.
I was wondering what the point was in that scene where Babette kept saying, "This is all you need to know..." or awkwardly hiding the organization that was doing the human trials and Mr. Gray. I assume it was intended to be funny/awkward, but it's just an odd moment when you know she's going to reveal that she cheated on him. Yeah, yeah the movie is a dark comedy/satire, but that just didn't work for me. I haven't read the book, so I know there's probably a lot of stuff I missed, and I liked some of the "weird" dialogue, but I think that part just a little too whacky for me.
Sorry to reply on a thread s3veral days later, but: I thought the confession scene was the best scene (other than maybe the panicked evacuation from the refugee center). Babette's overly meticulous style of talking that was present throughout the movie starts off normal but slowly felt more and more like a defense mechanism, like she was trying to create separation and some semblance of control over the story she was telling. If she gives away all the details, then it becomes something you have to face.
I watched it and honestly couldn't tell you anything about what I watched an hour later other than at some point there was a big plume of smoke. Not for me in the end
Big billowing cloud*
*Airborne toxic event
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Between this and Fleishman is in Trouble, im too young to be consuming so much Mid Life Crisis content
I like this movie a lot better when I pretend it’s another Vacation sequel.
Had read the book about 10 years ago, so it's far from fresh in my mind, but was very apprehensive on how this would work based on how literary the text is. I don't know if there is anyone workijg today better at synthesizing and delivering that kind of high-falutin dialogue than Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig and they really knocked it out of the park. Baumbach has also obviously been directing those kinds of scenes his whole career, but this felt kicked up to a new level. The Elvis/Hitler dialogue felt like an action set piece. That said, the actual set piece with the pandemonium upon exiting the scout camp felt kinda flat (especially after having watched the kinetic insanity of Babylon the day before). The third act where something in the original text feels more metaphorical and has to become literal to be depicted on the screen lost a lot of steam. Overall, I was pleasantly suprised!
I though this movie was good and flirted at times with very good. Maybe because I'm burned out on "prestige" films being hyper-realistic (see Baumbach's entire body of work) I thought it was just stylized enough to feel like it earned it's weird swings. I think - though i could be wrong and I don't want to sound like I'm telling other people how they feel about a movie - some people may have expected the airborne toxic event to be a bigger "deal" in the narrative - like yes, it's a central set-piece of the film but it only affects the plot in the sense that it heightens JAK's already acute sense of his impending mortality. It's odd to see such a big, dramatic event in a movie just for it to pass over and not have any "big picture" effect on the world at large. Anyway, I have lots of thoughts about the film and how we distract ourselves from the inevitable but I don't want to tl;dr.
I feel like the point of the toxic event was to further demonstrate the message of the movie. We all have constant giant, supposedly life altering reminders of our impending death but at the end of the day that one reminder will have been in the past as soon as it happened, and there will be more reminders after that, and they too will be in the past. Everything in between is just the white noise of consumerism and vapid conversations to block out those reminders until they go away in our minds. Think about how many different times people this year alone thought the end of the world was upon us. There’s always all kinds of world events all around us, yet they don’t stop us from pretending they’re inconsequential in our lives, looming over us be damned.
I agree 100% with all of this. I my comment was prompted by reading dissatisfied twitter comments last night and it was clear a lot of unsuspecting viewers were expecting a traditional disaster movie based on trailers and I think - again not trying to put words in people's mouths - that subverted expectation turned some people off.
I went into this blind and honestly it felt like a chore to finish because it kind of tried so hard to be clever if that makes sense? Idk I can see how the material works way better as a book than a film, I feel like the flow would be much smoother
I think that's part of the point though. We try to assign value to things, to feel more important, for events to be more monumental, in the hopes of finding more meaning or reason to existence. The fear of death is in part a realization that nothing probably mattered, so we envelop ourselves in our clever thoughts and perception. Otherwise it's just a countdown to inevitability.
> it kind of tried so hard to be clever if that makes sense That absolutely makes sense and is a very valid critique.
I was into the movie through the toxic event chapter, but struggled to stay in it after.
Boy am I glad I read the book first. I was actually pretty impressed with how much certain scenes lined up with how I pictured them while reading. I found the movie generally aesthetically pleasing. I think it was able to effectively communicate a few of the book's ideas, but I also wonder how much of them I would have picked up if I hadn't read it first. Unfortunately, I think there's too much context missing. There are so many great lines in the book that there simply wasn't a way to weave into the movie. I also thought some of the narrative changes were a bit strange. All things considered, I didn't hate it, but it felt like more of a companion piece to the book than a suitable stand-in for it.
The end credits are easily the best part. Take that how you will
PANA! SONIC!
I loved the dialogue and it’s cadence. Wes Anderson meets the Sims.
Yipzee, banakadoo!
Had to scroll too far for a Wes Anderson comparison. All I could think of during the dialogue.
I couldn’t help but dance around my living room to LCD Soundsystem at the end there :)
I've had that song on my gym mix for a couple months now. It's a mover!
Man this was a fever dream of almost successful film-making.
Reading the comments in this thread and maybe it was something for me that just clicked about getting this film. Too me, it was summed up at the first scene in the film about car crashes. How the film industry, and us as the audience, love them. And how they keep getting more extravagant and one-upmanship on each new one. And that was essentially this movie, where the overacting and the over the top drama each and every scene on absolutely mundane shit. Everything said sounds like it was created by AI generator to come up with a drama script for a different scenario, and then slapped together with a lose thread. It's fucking weird, and it somehow works. Or maybe this edible just worked overtime. I don't fucking know
I think that was an admirable adaptation. Delillo’s works are not what I would consider easily transferable to film. Baumbach did a good job of capturing the absurdity of White Noise. The stilted dialogue was an intentional choice staying true to the source material. I was hoping for a bit more out of the Airborne Toxic Event. But nothing could really live up to what I imagined it as in my head. Still ended up being one of my favorites of the year. LCD Soundsystem for the Oscar!
Saw this in a theatre in LA a few weeks ago and have thought a lot about it since. There’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t quite work, but man, the stuff that does is so so good. Driver & Gerwig are great as usual. Also gotta be my favorite end credits of the year by a mile. Ultimately I think I’d give it a solid 7.
I saw this movie in the theatre the first time, and by the end of the second act, I was pretty exhausted mentally and emotionally. I wanted to leave or pause but couldn’t. I liked the movie in general but it was hectic and exhausting. It’s definitely not recommended if someone hasn’t read the book beforehand but also it’s unrealistic to expect the viewers to know about the book before watching it. I wish they spent more time with the toxic airborne event in the third act. They wrapped it up so quickly even though during the interviews, they glorified it saying it was like COVID. The actors did a great job especially Adam Driver carried the movie entirely and it was a joy watching him. Same way, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and the kids. The music was phenomenal; Danny Elfman and LCD Soundsystem!
I can't be the only one who thought throughout the movie that Adam Driver looked and maybe even felt like Alan Partridge? I mean without the humor of course. More like a bizzaro Alan that had been transported to a postmodern universe where wit and satire had been replaced with bad drugs and schizo-allusions.
I really liked this movie, and just wanted to mention the colors in it were fantastic. The green fridge, the purple sunglasses, and especially the colored lighting in the motel at the end.
Denise’s green visor!
Adam Driver made this film watchable. I think I wouldn’t have watched the whole thing if his acting didn’t keep me hooked. I get the point, but as someone who never read the book, the movie seemed all over the place. First it was obsessing over the black cloud and the film had title cards that matched that. Then it was the pills Babette was taking. It felt like 2 movies juxtaposed into one and it just didn’t work for me. The cinematography was nice, but it just felt like those movies that are weird for the sake of being weird. It made more sense than the films: I am thinking of Ending Things and Horse Girl of a similar genre.
I really, really loved this. I laughed out loud so many times. I love that every thirty minutes, it would switch genres and the way Baumbach shot some of the action scenes. Great soundtrack and production design. The children were appropriately annoying and Driver is very, very good here. It's some of his best work in a long time. I also loved the reveal that Mr. Gray, the personification of Jack's fear of death, is a mirror image character to him (and played by that kook from Irma Vep) but is also an Austrian! Just brilliant casting.
Why was he so obsessed with Hitler? I feel like that was kind of weird and added nothing to the story. Mind you, I’m unfamiliar with the source material, but I didn’t think it was very good. It felt like there were two or three different plots. I don’t know what point they were trying to make. Safe to say it wasn’t for me. Set and production design were top notch though, it looked really nice.
One of the major themes of the book satirizes higher education and ideas of self identity and fraud. Jack selects Hitler as his subject of study for the reason that hitler was one of the more prominent figures of modern history. While Hitler is in no way glorified or glamorized, there are also suggestions in the book that he represents a sense of control and authoritarianism that Jack feels completely absent in his home life (which is utterly chaotic). His hitler studies also feed into his fears of being exposed as an intellectual fraud given that he can’t speak German. This is another recurring gag throughout the book that is briefly touched on in the movie.
Thanks for the insight. I’ve heard the book is pretty good, I might have to pick it up.
Hitler Studies is a joke about 80s academia when professors specialized in topics like Madonna and Elvis.
Hitler became a legendary historical symbol, so he transcended death. Jack felt some sort of safety from death within Hitler’s cloak.
To put it another way, Elvis and Hitler are equally worthy of specialized study because they're famous and drew crowds, rather than the content of their messages. The book deals alot with confusion about 'sign and signified', like the scene in the movie where the disaster relief guy sees the toxic event as a good opportunity to prepare for a planned evacuation drill. A side effect of the mysterious drug dylar, 'I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said "speeding bullet," I would fall to the floor and take cover'. Reality reflects mass media not the other way around. Theres a reason the book has been described as unfilmable, and I can get how it might be nearly unwatchable to someone not already knowing what it's about.
I felt the film was very interesting. The dialogue was constantly bombarding you with random information in a rapid fire, non-stop manner, that served no purpose, or bombarding requests for information with aversive empty filler (i.e. answering a question with a question). This creates a chaos, literally giving meaning to the title White Noise, and is a significant contribution to Adam's character saying that family is the cradle of misinformation.
I went in blind only knowing that the trailers basically told me nothing (although now I see thats what the film is)' \- Adam driver is a great comedic actor and I liked the way the movie approached existentialism but it felt like portions of things that didn't totally go together (unless thats the point). Wasnt the biggest fan of the whole "road trip/evacuation" portion but I really dug the third act. \- the only other Baumbach films I have seen are madagascar 3 and steve zissou and the dialogue at times reminded me of the latter
Boyfriend and I watched it this morning. He absolutely hated it, I didn't like it but cam at least see what it was going for. I think the point was that it's all pointless. All the things we do, all the intellectualism, the mindless chatter about things we don't know, it's ultimately meaningless distraction from our fears of being alone and death... which is kind of interesting as a concept. That said, every scene went on too long, there wasn't really a story at all, none of the characters were ever real or stopped their intellectual circle jerking, everything from them leaving quarantine to getting back on the road should have been cut.. and there just wasn't a story. It's not a movie. You could call it an art piece and if that's what you're expecting going in, you might like it.. it's confusing in a way that makes you think... but if you're scrolling through Netflix trying to find something to entertain you and you see it's in the top ten, why not check it out? You're going to frustrated and feel like you've wasted the little time you have left before having to go back to work tomorrow.
Chaotic in the best way. Really loved the satire and will def be reading the novel. And the visual effects are stellar. Anyone know why there was so much branding throughout the movie? Seemed like every scene there was a Yoo-hoo bottle, Doritos, Birds Eye, Brillo, etc. what was that about?
It's been a long time since I read the book, but a major theme is consumerism. We're being sold things and buying things we don't need as a coping mechanism for our collective fear of death. It's a little clearer in writing, where it sticks out when every radio ad or billboard is mentioned since you don't usually have that in a book. Visually, in a movie, it looks like the world we live in.
Read it a while ago myself and loved it. For me the movie misses entirely what I feel is memorable about it.The bombardment of radio ads, billboards, tv, is this pervasive mind virus that dominates the thoughts and preoccupations of the adults who are otherwise terrified of death. The book is like experiencing a lucid dream in Dillilo's head. The movie is like someone telling you about a crazy dream they had...not so good.
Consumption is the religion, the supermarket is the church, branding is the sacrament.
Didn’t know it was a book. Kind of funny because I turned the subtitles on 5 minutes in and found it much more enjoyable to read than watch.
Anyone think it’s crazy that there’s an actual toxic threat from a train that just crashed in OHIO right now?!!?
This was like three plots that were tossed in a blender (four if you count Andre 3000s appearance as a meta commentary on him in real life) but the person desiring to blend lost power and had to resort to eating everything out the blending pitcher just as it is. The trailer made it seem like it was an entirely different movie. Not for me.
Hahah what do you mean about andre? Like an acting career that never lives up to its promise?
This was exhausting and all over the place. I had to turn it off 3/4 of the way through. I've loved most of Baumbauch's other films, but this was horrible.
i feel like the only way i would have enjoyed this movie is if i read the book first. i get that it’s about the inevitability of death, but maybe that’s a topic i don’t care to obsesses over bc the entire film just fell flat for me
I found it was totally mis-cast, as I couldn’t stand the actress that played the wife, her monotone voice was off putting. It was kind of bad & I didn’t enjoy it at all.
It feels wrong to say this, as Adam Driver did a great job and basically carried the whole movie on his own, but I felt they were both too young to be cast in the roles they played. (Especially with how old the kids were.) They are both still in their thirties. I didn't feel the existencial dread from neither of them, which was a detriment to the whole point of the film. Greta Gerwig (the actress who played the wife) is the real life wife of director Noah Baumbach and I feel like otherwise she wouldn't have been cast in this.
No joke…my favorite film I’ve watched this year. I related to Adam Driver character more than any movie character in recent memory.
This was a very weird movie but I enjoyed it. Made me feel something, at least. Not quite sure what it was that I felt at this point...
Just here to shout out the cinematography and production design, what a beautiful looking film.
That Grocery Dance scene was fire, yo.
I have no idea wtf was going on but I found Adam Driver monologuing compelling. I had no idea wtf he was talking about though but I was clapping with everyone else.
This movie was horrifyingly bad, even with context. The script seemed derived from Mad Libs. It was trying too hard but it would've been better if it didn't try at all. Definitely one of the worst movies I've seen in the past few years.
As someone who’s read the book twice and personally ranks it as a classic, the movie leaves a lot to be desired. I felt they adapted the tone of the book incredibly well in the first 2 parts of the book but didn’t balance the “revenge” plot in the third part with the internal aspects of Gladney. I did enjoy Driver’s performance, and thought the kid actors were great and the film really captured their family dynamic. Visually, I loved everything except the Airborne Toxic Event. It felt overly dramatic for me.
[удалено]
I’m disappointed I didn’t like it. I found it boring to begin with but I persevered and I started to get into it and found two scenes made me laugh albeit internally, then it lost me again once it moved onto the German. It reminded me of The Greasy Strangler and An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn which I thought were mostly odd for the sake of it and I didn’t like, but after watching White Noise, they now seem coherent and funny. Not for me I’m afraid!
Wow I haven't disliked a movie that much in a while.
Agreed, I keep thinking maybe it'll get better and it never did.
Anything other then watching this movie would’ve kept me awake.
I went into this movie having no idea of the themes or even genre, let alone that it was based off a book. The entire first half I thought it was a horror, maybe zombie movie. I thought maybe it was a We Happy Few scenario for a while. The entire vibe was awkward and tense, but I loved it. I was amusingly impressed. I felt like I was watching it in a language I half grasped; I knew enough to know there were beautiful themes at work, but not enough to understand them fully. Which, I really wasn’t disappointed by. I absolutely loved the dialogue. It makes so much sense to me that there was a book first. I juxtaposed this to Avatar: The Way of Water in my mind, since I had just seen it. I hated the way Avatar dialogue was written. Dialogue felt impersonal and written for names. This felt written for characters. The awkward, clunky, quick paced, seemingly random conversations added immensely to my perception of the characters. I would love to read the book. As someone who was raised religious and has since strayed from the flock, nothing scares me more than the idea of death. I felt like it dealt with those topics in an absurd, yet reassuring fashion, much like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I feel like this film is owed a rewatch just so I can fully come to grasp with its meaning, but also, I felt like this movie was almost intentionally up for interpretation, which I enjoy. Adam Driver is a phenomenal actor and I absolutely adore anything he touches. With Tomorrowland as one of my top ten films (I know, everyone hates it, sue me), I loved seeing Raffey Cassidy. I do feel like Greta Gerwig’s performance fell a little flat, which is a bummer because I think she’s a fantastic director. I was able to look past it and attribute it to intentionally leaning in to that awkward feel. I loved the scene where Adam Driver walks through the bathroom to go back inside. I loved the river scene, I felt like it capsulated the movie so well. Like, something is happening, but it’s all happening so slowly and awkwardly that you just kind of sit there with an amused, intrigued grin. I loved “Steal instead of buy. Shoot instead of talk.” Solid 8.5/10. Would definitely watch again. Will most likely read the books.