“White Noise” Offers Disaster Cinema, Woody Allen Style

Adam Driver is a remarkable actor who has been a star for a few short years.

Driver’s choice of projects, which, in the post-“Star Wars” His career is a varied and fascinating one. While not every film has worked, Driver is consistently excellent in every film and the directors he’s worked with speak to his good taste as an actor (everyone from Ridley Scott to Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese to Spike and, currently, Francis Ford Coppola).

His most recent is a reunion of Noah Baumbach as they previously collaborated. “Marriage Story,” Both were a huge success. It has its moments of failure, however. “White Noise” Unsteady vehicles are not recommended.

The driver keeps the car from veering off the road.

Baumbach’s film stars Driver as Jack Gladney, a college professor whose wife and kids are comfortable in the suburban life they lead. A train accident can cause a toxic chemical to enter the atmosphere, polluting the air and slowly making the population more vulnerable.

At first, Jack is in denial about the event and can’t be bothered to leave the dinner table as the news worsens. Finally, the Gladney family abandons their home and goes into survival mode with the rest.

Droll and self-conscious from beginning to end “White Noise” shows Baumbach stretching considerably in a new genre for him but isn’t enough to really connect as an arthouse variant on a Disaster Movie. Yes, there’s impressive CGI effects and large-scale action sequences, but the whole thing is so dialog and idea driven, it’s like watching Woody Allen’s “Independence Day.”

However, the big tonal shifts don’t occur smoothly and there are sections that just don’t work.

FAST FACT Adam Driver served in the U.S. MilitaryAfter the terrorist attacks on 9/11, he joined the Marine Corps.

In a year full of notably overlong films in need of real editorial pruning, here’s another that required more cuts to give it better form. The opening act is a long, repetitive, and tedious piece that doesn’t allow the story to move.

Likewise, the third act, which isn’t as compelling as the scenes of the large-scale disaster taking place. Helping things to a large degree is Danny Elfman’s terrific score, reminiscent of his best, earlier works.

It’s a bleak affair, with the focus primarily on how humans, either via large-scale disaster or their own undoing, face nonexistence and extinction. While some of the information is well-written, it demonstrates how difficult it can be to adapt an idea-driven novel with high cerebrality.

I haven’t read Don DeCillo’s 1985 novel upon which this is based, though I’m a fan of his other works, particularly his 2003 novel, “Cosmopolis,” David Cronenberg turned it into a great film in 2012. “Cosmopolis,” Like “White Noise,” isn’t easy material to adapt (for all the things I love about Cronenberg’s film, my favorite scene from the novel isn’t in the film).

With its uneven teeter-tottering of thick sarcasm and earnest existentialism, the whole thing reminded me of Alan Rudolph’s “Breakfast of Champions” (1999); that movie, in which an all-star cast took on a definitive but challenging Kurt Vonnegut novel, wasn’t a total success but I’m kind of fond of it.

The same applies to “White Noise,” I found it enjoyable, although the experience was not perfect.

As much as I want to celebrate the undeniable stretch that this was for Baumbach, I’m unconvinced that the material and filmmaker were an ideal match. “White Noise” will likely become a curiosity item in Baumbach’s body of work. 

A few set pieces stand out, like Don Cheadle’s opening monolog on how movie car crashes are a form of social comfort food, which is, of course, completely true.

Then there’s the end credit sequence, a musical number set to a new song by LCD Soundsystem – it’s wonderful, speaks to the repetitive nature of grocery shopping, and seems like it belongs in a very different movie.

“White Noise” Although it may seem unsteady overall, it is still captivating.

Two and a Half Stars