Review: 'White Noise' is a quietly devastating portrait of a family caught in a consumerist nightmare

It may take a second, or even third, viewing to nail down exactly what writer-director Noah Baumbach is doing in “White Noise,” but whatever it is in this story of fracturing institutions — in the family, in academia, in society — it’s working.

Adapting Don DeLillo’s acclaimed novel, Baumbach introduces us to the Gladney family: The father, Jack (Adam Driver); the mother, Babette (Greta Gerwig); and their children, Denise (Raffey Cassidy), Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and Wilder (Henry Moore). It’s the early ‘80s, when the opening of a new A&P supermarket is a huge deal in a college town.

Jack is a professor at the college in this town, delivering lectures that intersect popular culture and the formal structure of storytelling intersect with his chosen field of study: Adolf Hitler. His colleagues, like his buddy Murray (Don Cheadle), treat him as big man on campus, while his students adore him.

In Act II, something happens that upends the natural order of this town’s life. A freight train derails in a fiery crash that releases dangerous chemicals skyward — in what’s referred to as “the airborne toxic event.”

The town is evacuated, and the Gladney family tries to hang together through the fear and chaos going on around them.

In Act III, the toxic event is over and people move back into their homes. But something has irrevocably changed. Uncertainty and paranoia are everywhere — and nowhere more pronounced than in Babette, who is sneaking doses of a mysterious pharmaceutical, called Dylar, when she thinks no one is looking. But Denise, the product of Jack’s first marriage, is looking. 

Baumbach has taken DeLillo’s story — the first time he’s written and directed an adaptation (unless you count co-writing the script for Wes Anderson’s animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) — and dug into the dark heart of American consumerism and excess in the Reagan years. The candy-colored production design, by Jess Gonchor, dances around the Gladneys in the supermarket aisles, with products meant to improve our lives but instead making them more complicated.

“My life is either/or,” Babette confesses to Jack one night. “Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps. … I hope it lasts forever.”

Gerwig’s performance is a marvel, depicting Babette as an energized ball of anxiety, her hope overwhelmed by her doubts. She’s nicely matched by Driver, a master of his universe who is faced with the frightening prospect that the uncaring world is bigger than that universe.

“White Noise” is set to stream on Netflix after a theatrical run, but there’s nothing Netflix-and-chill about it. It’s a movie that challenges the viewer’s assumptions that things will go where you think they do. Baumbach means to provoke, to agitate the audience into thinking about our consumer culture and whether it’s making us as happy as the advertising promises.

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‘White Noise’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters; starts streaming December 30 on Netflix. Rated R for brief violence and language. Running time: 136 minutes.