White Noise is like a Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown – in a good way

Over the past seven or eight years, Netflix worked to make a name for itself as a new kind of studio: one where filmmakers could take passion projects and realise them with minimal creative interference. That helped to thaw Hollywood’s suspicions – how could streaming be the death of cinema when it gave Martin Scorsese $250 million to make The Irishman? But since the firm’s subscriber slump earlier this year, the approach has started to look unsustainable, and it was widely reported in June that the days of blank cheques had come to an end.

Does White Noise represent that era’s last, loopy hurrah? It certainly has a “last days of Rome” feel about it. Thrillingly arch and unsettling, it’s an adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel about an academic and his family weathering a surreal public-health crisis, written and directed by Noah Baumbach.

For this usually understated filmmaker, it’s a madcap outlier, and often resembles an early Steven Spielberg film having a nervous breakdown. Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at an obliviously smug liberal-arts college in the American Midwest of the 1980s. Greta Gerwig is his wife Babette, sheltering under a corkscrew perm and surreptitiously popping pills of Dylar, an experimental drug designed to suppress fear of death.

Baumbach’s screenplay retains the three-part structure of DeLillo’s novel, and the first section, titled Waves and Radiation, is an opportunity for the audience to retune itself to the film’s eccentric wavelength. There’s much Altman-esque cross-talk – lots of verbal jokes bubbling up from the background – while the setting is vintage small-town Spielberg with the contrast queasily cranked up. The food and drink brands lining the supermarket shelves have a radioactive glow: the whole society looks like a health risk even before the Airborne Toxic Event comes billowing forth.

This calamity unfolds when a fuel truck collides with a train carrying dangerous chemicals, and the Gladneys join the convoy of panicking townsfolk being buffeted from one muster point to the next. In the wake of the pandemic, many of DeLillo’s bleakest comic ideas are recognisable: the squabbling over which symptoms count and which don’t, or the emergency response organisation SIMUVAC, which decides to use this real disaster as a practice run for future drills.

In the thick of the crisis, the self-satisfied Jack (of course) proves useless, but he keeps on projecting his signature air of wry detachment. Perhaps after the United States’ hapless response to Covid, Baumbach wanted to rewind to the point at which the rot set in, and reveal wholesome middle America as a petri dish of neuroses and hypocrisies.

It’s combative stuff, and not all of it works: the third, frostier, more intimate section, crammed with chewy philosophical monologues, doesn’t quite align with Baumbach’s dry screwball sensibilities. But if Netflix are pruning back their riskier output, we should be glad that this managed to slip out the door first.

On Netflix now