Noah Baumbach's most ambitious film to date is this comedy adapted from Don DeLillo's supposedly unfilmable novel. "White Noise" is in some parts Spielbergian sci-fi and Godardian fantasy with even a dash of Altman thrown in for good measure and you may have trouble finding the Baumbach we all know and love in this heady brew...or perhaps not. Baumbach was always at his best lampooning a certain kind of American lifestyle and this really is a brilliant satire.
Baumbach finds fun in all sorts of places; a disaster movie scenario, a send-up of academia, consumerism and the pharmaceutical industry and once again makes great use of Adam Driver's hang-dog persona and Greta Gerwig's vacant kookiness. He also casts Don Cheadle beautifully against type.
He and Driver are professors in the 'College on the Hill', Cheadle specialising in celebrity studies and Driver in Hitler studies, (apparently Driver's so charasmatic in his work that no-one can mention Hitler's name without a nod in Driver's direction). It may also be Baumbach's most accessible movie to date despite its unlikely source, very funny in a New Yorker kind of way and even serious enough to touch a nerve now and then. It may not be quite in the class of "Marriage Story" but it does confirm Baumbach as one of the best directors in America today.
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