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As we’ve learned over the past couple of years, catastrophic events can change everything—about how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. And when disaster strikes for a family in White Noise, it causes a couple to struggle with their own feelings of hopelessness and fear.
White Noise stars Adam Driver as Jack Gladney, a renowned Nazi Studies professor at a small Ohio college in the ‘80s. Jack, his wife, Babbette (Greta Gerwig), and the four children who make up their blended family live a perfectly happy life together in this small town until a catastrophic train crash changes life as they know it. Toxic chemicals are released into the air, and the family is forced to evacuate their home. But as they eventually try to return to their everyday lives, they find themselves wrestling with their own views of life and death.
Before it all comes crashing down, though, almost everything about the family and their story plays like an ‘80s sitcom—only maybe a little more pretentious. It’s all wonderfully absurd—this oddly chatty dramedy about these totally ‘80s characters. Jack is known as an expert on Hitler, though he’s only just started learning German. He wears a black robe and dark glasses on campus, and he spends his days debating life and death and a variety of completely ridiculous topics with his colleagues. But Adam Driver manages to do it all in a way that can sometimes be absolutely riveting. Babbette, meanwhile, teaches fitness classes for the elderly at the local church—just a comically stereotypical ‘80s mom—but their children worry about her increasing forgetfulness and the mysterious pills she’s been taking.
As the family sets out to escape the giant black cloud that threatens to cause a variety of ever-changing symptoms—and possibly even death, sometime in the future—their adventure feels like National Lampoon’s Indie Apocalypse Vacation, with all sorts of mishaps, misinformation, and misadventures. But when they return home—and the story sets into its third act—the tone shifts. Those quirky, pretentious college professor debates are replaced with Jack and Babbette’s obsession with death, which gets deeper and darker as the film approaches its conclusion. And what starts out as a quirky but fun—and insightful—film just falls apart in the end.
White Noise certainly isn’t a mainstream kind of film, but that’s part of what makes it so entertaining: the characters, the situations, and the writing are all delightfully absurd (at least for the first two acts). But after all of that bizarre fun, the change in tone and story and message in the end is a letdown.
White Noise makes it way to theaters on November 25, 2022, before arriving on Netflix on December 30, 2022.
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