With “White Noise” Netflix brings a satirical drama by Noah Baumbach to the cinema. Adam Driver mimics a Hitler expert with an irrational fear of death who, in the mid-1980s, has to embark with his family of six on an absurd escape from a real threat.
It’s been three years since Noah Baumbach and Adam Driver worked together for Netflix. At that time the celebrated and later also award-winning drama “Marriage Story” about a failed married couple was released. Now this fruitful combination goes into the next round. For this, Baumbach has taken on a material by Don DeLillo from 1985 that was previously considered unfilmable.
With a belly and a full head of hair, Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor at a university in the Midwest who is known around the world as an expert on Hitler in the mid-1980s. And this despite the fact that he hardly speaks a sentence of German himself, no matter how hard he tries with the help of a teacher. Gladney is nevertheless celebrated like a rock star by his students and colleagues when he delivers his theatrical lectures. His colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) wishes without envy that his Elvis readings would one day be as successful as Jack’s about the Führer.
Jack lives a busy, if chaotic, private life with his fourth wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their blended family of four children. The couple likes this life so much that they don’t want it to end. And so, while still in good health, Jack and Babette are driven by an irrational fear of death.
Babette soon begins to seem stranger and stranger to the pills called “Dylar,” which even the family doctor doesn’t know about. When a freight train derailed and exploded in the immediate vicinity of the Gladneys’ home after colliding with a tanker truck, a dark cloud of poison spread over the place. Death is really getting closer.
After initially dismissing the threat, Jack is finally forced to evacuate his family. From now on, the six go through a lot of overwrought and absurd situations in the prevailing chaos. Among other things, the family carriage lands with a big jump in the river. Despite all the hopelessness, Father Jack only manages to pull the cart out of the proverbial dirt and maneuver it back onto the street – right into the traffic jam of the other residents fleeing from the cloud – by steering it.
What at this point sounds like a screwball comedy à la Chevy Chase is just a small excerpt of what “White Noise” has to offer. Rather, it’s a film between Lynch, Lee and Coen. A satire based on intellectual dialogue, in which even the children keep correcting each other’s facts and engaging in adult conversations while setting the table. The findings are partly bitter, partly entertaining in all their absurdity. The constantly running television works like the Internet today, and the consumption of mass media is also criticized at the same time. Although the novel is almost 40 years old, many things seem frighteningly up-to-date. The fact that Lars Eidinger of all people ends up playing the lunatic with German roots is whatever you want it to be. If you don’t let that irritate you, you’ll be entertained for 136 minutes.
“White Noise” will be in German cinemas from December 8th and will be available on Netflix from December 30th.
