X
- 2022
- R
- Netflix
- 2 h 16 m
- 2022
- R
- Netflix
- 2 h 16 m
Summary White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo.
Directed By: Noah Baumbach
Written By: Don DeLillo, Noah Baumbach
- 2022
- R
- Netflix
- 2 h 16 m
- 2022
- R
- Netflix
- 2 h 16 m
White Noise
66
5.4
Where to Watch
Summary White Noise dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Based on the book by Don DeLillo.
Directed By: Noah Baumbach
Written By: Don DeLillo, Noah Baumbach
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 45 Critic Reviews
66
62% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
31% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
7% Negative
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 45 Critic Reviews
66
62% Positive
28 Reviews
28 Reviews
31% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
7% Negative
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
This could be seen as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation – and as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation, it’d be one of the best – but there is a genuine heart to the film, as well as intellect. Cheadle, Gerwig and Driver are all superb, while Sam Nivola and Raffey Cassidy give their smart-mouth, role reversal kids an impossible likeability.
Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 86 User Ratings
5.4
37% Positive
32 Ratings
32 Ratings
38% Mixed
33 Ratings
33 Ratings
24% Negative
21 Ratings
21 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 86 User Ratings
5.4
37% Positive
32 Ratings
32 Ratings
38% Mixed
33 Ratings
33 Ratings
24% Negative
21 Ratings
21 Ratings
Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches.
White Noise is certainly uneven — wildly so, probably by design — but it’s also never boring, always eager to throw something new at the viewer, and it’s eager to entertain. I never imagined I’d laugh so hard while watching a movie adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
Few film adaptations so awkwardly aligned deliver quite so many full-on belly laughs. It doesn’t exactly work but, no, we won’t throw “bore” at the filmmakers.
I’m afraid this is another case of Netflix’s Big Blank Check indulging a filmmaker, who cashed it and lost himself in the “White Noise” superficialities while never quite wrestling a perhaps-unfilmable novel into shape.
Even when it tries to be funny, there’s never any point of connection. The emotions in White Noise are neither real nor meant to be real. The audience is always watching from a distance — until, finally, it starts wondering why it’s watching at all.
This movie is best described as a surrealistic commentary on the most fundamental human condition: we are beings whose sole purpose is to survive briefly to reproduce. We end up liking this "surviving", wanting it to continue long after we have served Darwin's famously established role.
The supermarket in the movie symbolizes indulgence and bliss in life, though natural selection cares for neither. Creatures exist because they are good at perpetually existing (I.e. through feeding and eventual reproduction) not because they have any purpose whatsoever. The supermarket, through it's abundance of excessive choices, exemplifies the jovial defiance of that reality. We are like Bender (Futurama) : conceived to bend metal, yet then plastering pleasure, pain, and meaning onto his meaningless existence.
This concept is conveyed surrealistically, intended to be read more like your own dreams than a movie. Really fun to watch, and really existentially triggering.
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The stilted dialogue and unreality of everything was constantly reminding me of Cronenberg's Cosmopolis all throughout. Come to find out both movies are adaptations of books by the same author, Don DeLillo. I haven't read DeLillo's work, but he clearly has a unique style if two directors as different as Noah Baumbach and David Cronenberg wind up making such similar feeling movies out of his source material. I guess his style must work better on the page because it doesn't quite work on screen, though it is constantly interesting. The best thing to come from this is that it got us a new LCD Soundsystem song, New Body Rhumba, and it **** slaps.
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This movie ended up being weirdly prophetic of the train derailment/ecological disaster in Ohio, which is where the movie was shot oddly enough.
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White Noise. Overly intellectualized postmodern romp in middle America. Cheadle and Driver are absolutely outstanding. But the postmodern classic book simply doesn’t translate to the screen. I feel bad for Driver, he probably should have gotten a best actor nom, but you can’t see past the movie itself.Rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made disasters, and the potentially regenerative nature of violence is just too much for 2 hours and 16 minutes.
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bad
[ bad ]
adjective, worse, worst;(Slang) bad·der, bad·dest for 36.
not good in any manner or degree.
bad
[ bad ]
adjective, worse, worst;(Slang) bad·der, bad·dest for 36.
not good in any manner or degree.
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Production Company
A24,
BB Film Productions,
Heyday Films,
NBGG Pictures,
Netflix Studios,
Passage Pictures (II)
Release Date Nov 25, 2022
Duration 2 h 16 m
Rating R
Tagline You can't hear it if it's everywhere
Awards
Golden Globes, USA
• 1 Nomination
Indiana Film Journalists Association, US
• 3 Nominations
Venice Film Festival
• 1 Win & 2 Nominations
