White noise ★★★
DRAMA (2022)
Directed by: Noah Baumbach
InterpretationsCast: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle

Reagan’s conservative America, the end of the Cold War, and even the aesthetic style of the era are artfully mocked.

Each film by Noah Baubach, one of the most prominent representatives of modern American cinema, is a special event, especially when he screens one of the most popular novels by the master of “American” literature, Don DeLillo. In the center is a large family and its conflict, joyful and dramatic everyday life of the mid-1980s: a university father (Adam Driver), an active mother (Greta Gerwig) and … an army of children grow more or less harmoniously, until a horrific accident and the environmental disaster it caused put their lives at risk.

Baubach quickly pulls off a rather chaotic film that overlays a layer of comedy on top of its much more dramatic, almost tragic foundation. Reagan’s conservative America, the end of the Cold War, and even the aesthetic style of the era are the subject of clever, sometimes delightful satire here in a series of well-crafted scenes. The paradox of a father professor who specializes in Nazi history, “magic” drugs, aliens, and so on, further enhances the chaos, which is precisely what the name “white noise” indicates.

“DeLillo’s language seemed familiar to me. He weaves American pop culture with phraseology into his prose so beautifully. The story is about individuals and families, but there is a satirical twist to the structure and plot for which I needed to find a cinematic counterpart. And since the book is mainly about American culture, which was covered by the media (television, radio, advertising, film culture and film narrative), I approached it in a cinematic way, ”says the American himself. his role model.

Beneath all this, however, lies the film’s main theme of the horror of death. It fills the heart of Mother Babette, plunging her into despair, he symbolically whirls like a huge monster, with black and red clouds, reminiscent of something from Stranger Things. On the other hand, despite interesting efforts, Baubach’s approach seems to have been influenced more by the “meta” image of 2022 than by DeLillo’s more existential nature.