[FILM]
WHITE NOISE
That’ll be the Airborne Toxic Event, then.
★★★
OUT NOW (CINEMAS), 30 DECEMBER (NETFLIX) CERT 15 / 135 MINS
DIRECTOR Noah Baumbach
CAST Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Jodie Turner-Smith, André Benjamin
PLOT Professor Jack Gladney (Driver) and his wife Babette (Gerwig) live a busy life with their large family. Their constant worries about death are, however, thrown into sharp relief when an accident throws a cloud of chemical waste over their town — soon referred to as the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’.
ACROSS THREE DECADES and around a dozen directorial efforts, we have come to know what A Noah Baumbach Film is. We might expect some lo-fi Millennial Manhattanite angst (Frances Ha, Mistress America); perhaps a Sundance-friendly approach to middle-age male malaise (Greenberg, While We’re Young); or a deeply honest probing of relationships and family (Marriage Story, The Meyerowitz Stories). White Noise, the filmmaker’s latest, has all of the above laced into it, full of his usual panache and intellectual rigour, but it feels deeply unusual for what we think of as A Noah Baumbach Film: this is an apocalyptic sci-fi spectacular, offering action set-pieces, dead bodies racking up, a sweeping Hollywood score from Danny Elfman — and a jarringly wacky post-credits dance sequence. It is an odd beast.