White Noise (2022)
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White Noise Movie Review
White Noise is a 2022 absurdist comedy drama film directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. It is by far the director’s worst movie yet.
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“But out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin,
we keep inventing hope“
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College professor Jack Gladney and his family’s comfortable suburban life is upended when a nearby chemical leak causes “The Airborne Toxic Event”, releasing a noxious black cloud over the region that forces the Gladney family to evacuate. Apparently based on a respected but unfilmable novel, this is what happens when you adapt material unintended for the big screen treatment. I don’t think I would enjoy reading this book either, but it would certainly be better than watching this disastrous, pretentious postmodernist bullcrap.
What begins as sort of a drama or a dramedy quickly evolves into a disaster movie and then an absurdist comedy and it also has a couple of horror/thriller sequences. Not only did none of this work, but the idea that somehow merging all of these different tones, genres and influences together into a single project would work was always implausible, and the movie did end up being incoherent and more annoying than anything else.
But there is one aspect here that is even worse than its unconvincing genre-bending narrative and that is the dialogue. Wow, was it bad. Rare are times when I’ve heard worse or more pretentious dialogue. Basically, what you have here are characters speaking in these overly enunciated and elaborate speeches that felt not only false, but also plain unlikable. Every speech reeked of faux intellectualism.
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I also did not care for White Noise’s acting performances. The cast is good, but the roles are bad and this is by far the worst that I’ve seen Adam Driver be in forever. He is overly theatrical as the entire movie itself is stagy, so the dialogue and acting is also like that. Gerwig also did not fare any better and most of their conversations were off-puttingly ostentatious and simply unrealistic. The movie is also overlong and the third act was just dumb in its strange tone and sequences that never worked.
White Noise is a movie that tries to be this genre-bending showcase of different tones and experiences, but it fails miserably at every single one of them. Even worse is the dialogue itself, which is ridiculously ostentatious and just plain annoying. The acting performances are also mediocre and the movie is so pretentious that it reeked of pseudo-intellectualism throughout. Thus, this frustrating postmodernist bullcrap definitely represents the nadir of Noah Baumbach’s career.
My Rating – 2
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