‘White Noise’ Venice Review: Noah Baumbach Teams With Adam Driver & Greta Gerwig In Wickedly Smart Comedy For Dark Times
deadline.comDon DeLillo’s post modernist 1985 novel, White Noise has been long desired by filmmakers trying to crack the nut of how to bring the complex dark comedy to the screen.
Barry Levinson made an attempt that didn’t come to fruition in 2004. Director Michael Almereyda was announced in 2016, also going nowhere.
James L. Brooks’ Gracie Films had it optioned at one point. But it seems entirely appropriate that it should finally land into the hands of Noah Baumbach, a self-professed mega fan of the book he read first in college in the late 80’s and saw it as a very satiric yet accurate account of the sad state of affairs of the world at that time.
However by 2021 when he got around to adapting and directing the first of his own films he didn’t write as an original screenplay, the multiple themes running though the book not only were still relevant, they seem more of this time then the 37 years since the book’s publication.Although it might be nearly impossible to perfectly transfer the tricky tone and themes running rampant in this eccentric story of a college professor of Hitler Studies at a small midwestern college and the apocalyptic thoughts running through his head, not to mention those of his offbeat family, Baumbach, keeping the setting in the 80’s, clearly gets it.
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