'White Noise' makes Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig pretty easy to tune out – CNN

CNN  —  Adam Driver and writer-director Noah Baumbach follow their collaboration on the dour “Marriage Story” with a considerably quirkier Netflix movie in “White Noise,” a faithful adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel that loses a great deal in translation. Baumbach’s pandemic-inspired undertones resonate on that level, but it’s played in such stilted fashion as to make “White Noise” pretty easy to tune out. There’s a personal quality to the film, which includes casting Baumbach’s partner, Greta Gerwig, who has been busily making her own mark as a director, including the upcoming “Barbie.” In a way, her off-kilter performance encapsulates both the David Lynch-ian aspect that Baumbach was seeking to achieve and how it misfires, feeling precious in a way that makes it difficult to buy into much of what’s on screen. Sporting the kind of “dad bod” that doesn’t exactly dovetail with all the social-media thirst directed his way, Driver plays Jack Gladney, a college professor in Hitler Studies. He’s on his fourth wife, Babette (Gerwig), with a quartet of kids from the couple’s various marriages and a circle of pompous overly educated friends, the most prominent of which is played by Don Cheadle. Soon, however, trouble begins to
Read More