Post by Dracula on Dec 26, 2022 21:29:54 GMT -5
White Noise(12/18/2022)
I’m not usually one to root for Netflix given that they seem hell bent on destroying movie theaters among other potentially malignant effects they have on cinema culture, but still I do feel kind of sorry for them this year. They put a lot of big investments in certain auteurs to deliver award season triumphs for them and basically all the horses they bet on seemed to trip before even leaving the gates with both critics and audiences. Blonde seemingly enraged more people than it entertained, Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) was declared “pretentious” and dismissed right from its festival premiere, and even Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio hasn’t really lit the world on fire. Damn near the only thing that seems to be working out for them is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which being a sequel filled with stars is almost certainly the least ambitious of the projects I named. On some level I should be happy that these filmmakers somehow conned the deep pocketed streamer into funding their weird-ass visions, but the truth is that if Netflix doesn’t get rewarded for these investments even with award season soft power they’re going to stop making investments like this at all, which is kind of dire since they’re some of the only ones left funding these things. And perhaps the least lucrative of all these investments is the one they saved for last: Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise,” which reportedly cost $80 million to make and will likely annoy and befuddle the majority of their customers who stumble upon it.
I actually did read the Don DeLillo book this is based on about ten years ago when I was exploring some of the canonical 20th Century novelists like Phillip Roth and John Updike and I must say I didn’t really “get it” at the time and revisiting the subject matter via this film (which is pretty faithful in both tone and text) I’m not much more impressed. That novel is a highly postmodernist and is meant to be a social satire about various broad cultural trends in the mid-eighties more so than a straightforward story or character study. It follows a college professor who’s the head of the Hitler Studies department at a fictional university who has a strained relationship with his wife and the plot so much as it exists looks at the fallout (literal and otherwise) of what happens to the family after a nearby chemical spill leads to a “toxic airborne event that forces them to evacuate their home rather abruptly and the aftermath of this. The film maintains the 1980s setting of the original and that novel has aged… interestingly. Certain ideas in it, like the supermarket as a symbol of everything wrong with modern consumerism, feel dated and passé. Meanwhile other aspects of the novel like the frenzied and misinformation fueled response to a big emergency in the second act, feels like they could at least theoretically take on a new life in a modern post-Covid context but I’m not sure Baumbach really had the time to make that connection fully.
Honestly I’m not sure Baumbach was the best fit for this material to begin with. Upper class ennui and academic pretentions have certainly been themes in his work before, but he usually handles this through lightly comic but ultimately pretty naturalistic film styling. By contrast this movie is heightened to the nth degree. Basically no one hear speaks or acts like normal real world people, rather, pretty much everything that happens here is meant to make some satirical point. The main character is comically stubborn and inept in the real world while engaging in an inherently ridiculous field of study and much of his wife’s arc is based around an absurd literalization of the intellectual and spiritual decay of the intellectual classs, a situation that frankly looks like quite the first world problem from where I sit. The movie (and novel) kind of wants to make a point about every issue under the sun and ends up not making many of them very well and as a simple movie-going experience the whole thing is just rather alienating and disconnected from reality more than it’s plugged into it. These kinds of outlandish and over-ambitious statements about “everything” do work sometimes when you get someone like Charlie Kaufman making something like Synecdoche, New York, but more often you end up with something like White Noise where you have no idea why anyone thought this was a good idea.
** out of Five
I’m not usually one to root for Netflix given that they seem hell bent on destroying movie theaters among other potentially malignant effects they have on cinema culture, but still I do feel kind of sorry for them this year. They put a lot of big investments in certain auteurs to deliver award season triumphs for them and basically all the horses they bet on seemed to trip before even leaving the gates with both critics and audiences. Blonde seemingly enraged more people than it entertained, Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) was declared “pretentious” and dismissed right from its festival premiere, and even Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio hasn’t really lit the world on fire. Damn near the only thing that seems to be working out for them is Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which being a sequel filled with stars is almost certainly the least ambitious of the projects I named. On some level I should be happy that these filmmakers somehow conned the deep pocketed streamer into funding their weird-ass visions, but the truth is that if Netflix doesn’t get rewarded for these investments even with award season soft power they’re going to stop making investments like this at all, which is kind of dire since they’re some of the only ones left funding these things. And perhaps the least lucrative of all these investments is the one they saved for last: Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel “White Noise,” which reportedly cost $80 million to make and will likely annoy and befuddle the majority of their customers who stumble upon it.
I actually did read the Don DeLillo book this is based on about ten years ago when I was exploring some of the canonical 20th Century novelists like Phillip Roth and John Updike and I must say I didn’t really “get it” at the time and revisiting the subject matter via this film (which is pretty faithful in both tone and text) I’m not much more impressed. That novel is a highly postmodernist and is meant to be a social satire about various broad cultural trends in the mid-eighties more so than a straightforward story or character study. It follows a college professor who’s the head of the Hitler Studies department at a fictional university who has a strained relationship with his wife and the plot so much as it exists looks at the fallout (literal and otherwise) of what happens to the family after a nearby chemical spill leads to a “toxic airborne event that forces them to evacuate their home rather abruptly and the aftermath of this. The film maintains the 1980s setting of the original and that novel has aged… interestingly. Certain ideas in it, like the supermarket as a symbol of everything wrong with modern consumerism, feel dated and passé. Meanwhile other aspects of the novel like the frenzied and misinformation fueled response to a big emergency in the second act, feels like they could at least theoretically take on a new life in a modern post-Covid context but I’m not sure Baumbach really had the time to make that connection fully.
Honestly I’m not sure Baumbach was the best fit for this material to begin with. Upper class ennui and academic pretentions have certainly been themes in his work before, but he usually handles this through lightly comic but ultimately pretty naturalistic film styling. By contrast this movie is heightened to the nth degree. Basically no one hear speaks or acts like normal real world people, rather, pretty much everything that happens here is meant to make some satirical point. The main character is comically stubborn and inept in the real world while engaging in an inherently ridiculous field of study and much of his wife’s arc is based around an absurd literalization of the intellectual and spiritual decay of the intellectual classs, a situation that frankly looks like quite the first world problem from where I sit. The movie (and novel) kind of wants to make a point about every issue under the sun and ends up not making many of them very well and as a simple movie-going experience the whole thing is just rather alienating and disconnected from reality more than it’s plugged into it. These kinds of outlandish and over-ambitious statements about “everything” do work sometimes when you get someone like Charlie Kaufman making something like Synecdoche, New York, but more often you end up with something like White Noise where you have no idea why anyone thought this was a good idea.
** out of Five
