Synopsis
Great American Novelist Don DeLillo published White Noise in 1985. Despite Hollywood’s best efforts, no one has succeeded in adapting it to film until now. Noah Baumbach’s version, which opened the New York Film Festival, stars Adam Driver as a middle-aged academic Jack (an expert in “Hitler studies”) whose already askew suburban family life is disrupted by a mysterious “airborne toxic event.” The cast includes Greta Gerwig (the writer-director of Lady Bird and Baumbach’s partner) as Jack’s drug-addicted wife Babette and Don Cheadle, as his colleague, a professor in Elvis studies. It was a long time coming, but the film’s pandemic-era release and eco-jitters couldn’t be timelier. The Guardian calls it “a fascinating, invigorating spectacle.”