‘White Noise’ Film Review: Adam Driver Fears Death in Noah Baumbach’s Don DeLillo Adaptation

thewrap.com:

and knockabout laughs — are the trickiest to make breathe onscreen.But it moves with purpose from the get-go as composer Danny Elfman’s Coplandesque strains herald a new school year coming to life for Jack, a protective husband/father in a bustling family with kind, attentive fitness instructor Babette (a crispy-permed Greta Gerwig) and their hyperaware brood: contrarian know-it-all adolescent Heinrich (Sam Nivola); observant tweener and eating-health monitor Denise (Raffey Cassidy); and littler ones Steffie (May Nivola) and Wilder (Jodie Turner-Smith).

At his college, Jack’s popular Hitler Studies class has a rock-worship tinge, and at the orderly supermarket gleaming with candy-colored name brands, shopping is the family’s regenerative power source (while news footage of calamities are their favorite home entertainment).

In private, though, Jack and Babette can barely manage their palpable everyday dread — Lol Crawley’s textured suburbia cinematography turning one imaginatively directed bedroom nightmare of Jack’s into something out of an existentialist “Poltergeist.” And Babette’s private popping of a mysterious white pill hasn’t gone unnoticed by Jack or Denise.But when a semi crashes into a train carrying toxic chemicals, creating a black cloud and a mass evacuation to a crowded highway and a cramped scout camp, mortality comes front and center, bonding everyone in fear, conspiracies, and speculation.

Jack – briefly exposed to the poisonous air at a gas station – now feels his own death like a ticking clock. What’s real and what isn’t about the situation, though, allows for deadpan humor: déjà vu is one rumored symptom, and Jack’s exchange with a rescue simulation administrator is the stuff of postmodern vaudeville..