White Noise is a disgracefully disjointed discourse on a dysfunctional family

As a fan of the Adam Driver- Noah Baumbach collaboration, I was looking forward to White Noise. But the film now on Netflix is not only a pretentious muddle mixing a survival drama with a marital exposition, it is also a crashing bore, insisting on ploughing along with its paralytic plot even when it has long overstayed its welcome.

It is hard to decode what director Noah Baumbach and actor Adam Driver were thinking while working on this weird kinky rambling piece of absurdist cinema filled with Grand Canyon-like holes that require astounding powers of gambolling and hopping to get to the other side.

Leaps of faith are not the thing here. We need divine intervention to understand why director Noah’s arc is so topsy-turvy and dark. Or why, in the first place, Noah and Adam Driver after the masterly Marriage Story, decided to make this strange and incredibly soulless film about a chemical catastrophe in 1984 which has the Gladney family running for cover.

The toxic discharge which threatens to kill them all is treated as some kind of a joke, riddled with questions that the script cannot be bothered with. It’s too busy being smart sexy and savvy.

Kindly be warned: the chemical disaster is not all that the film is about. It is also about Hitler, Elvis, a mystery pill called Dylar and an even more mysterious pill inventor called Mr Gray whom Mr Protagonist guns down. But Mr Gray doesn’t die. Neither does Mr Protagonist. Then who dies? Only we do, of sheer ennui.

White Noise truly tests our patience. It is scattered and satirical when, considering the issues of mortality that it raises, it needed to be harnessed and serious in tone. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig (the latter is the director’s wife in real life) play Husband and Wife in a doll’s house manner. Stiff and starchy, as though suppressing a mutually shared laugh over a joke that only they are privy to.

We the viewers must bear with their eccentricities. Nothing in White Noise rings true. Everyone behaves like a puppet on a string. Or more likely on some hallucinatory drug which induces a kind of suburban lethargy which makes everything look hazy distant, unreal.

Not the least of the irritants that pervade the plot is the lack of a centre. There is no core conflict. During potentially dramatic moments the characters chatter and sweep the crisis under a carpet of causticity. The opening where we are introduced to Jack and Babette Gladney and their children from the past and present marriage looks like a spoof of The Brady Bunch. The mid-portion where the family speeds away from the chemical calamity resembles any survival drama with the characters learning the value of screaming and shuddering and running fast.

Then comes the marital conflict, where Gerwig and Driver do a vapid version of Marriage Story, each conversing as though reading lines from a teleprompter.

The phoney feel-cooked film ends with all the characters dancing in a supermarket to an insanely catchy rock ‘n’ roll tune. The supermarket, we are told earlier during the shambolic shindig, is the epitome of life’s most serene experiences. You buy some, you die some.

That may be so. But the film doesn’t anywhere close to that kind of nirvanic wisdom. White Noise is the first major celluloid disappointment of the year. Let’s see what other letdowns the year has in store.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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