White Noise

I don't know how to describe this film, but it almost feels like watching 3 different films. It started like a parody of dead poet society, then follows up by a parody of war of the world, then a parody of unfaithful. And it seems like there's no correlation between these sequences.

Yes, i'm aware White Noise is a satire of a supposedly average american family dealing with mundane troubles of death, live, love blah blah blah. Yes, i know it's based on a novel. No, i haven't read the novel. But seeing this film as is, and for whatever this film trying to be, i don't find it entertaining. Most of the humorous aspects are cringe.

4/10.

It's a 'surrealism film' , but not really.

As someone who didn't read the book the movie is based on, i will say that i did not connect with this movie or the characters. Am ok with not connecting with characters but the characters in this movie are hard to understand which is odd because they talk and talk (usually at 100 miles an hour and over each other) so you think they would be all out in the open but it was like a wall between them and me. Like i completely failed to understand what it was that the author was saying about the world or the country when he wrote the book. Though i assume that the book was making some sort of commentary about the state of affairs because this movie feels somewhat too large in scale to just be a movie about coming to term with mortality and the difficulties that can arise in a marriage. Like the movie isn't bad but what are you? I will watch it again when it comes out on Netflix to try and see it with fresher eyes but if the purpose of the movie is to frustrate people so much that we rewatch it multiple times, i will say that they will succeed.

It's funny when you encounter a film with so many likeable elements that simply never cohere into something that works. This film reminded me of "I Heart Huckabees" in that sense ... I enjoyed all the parts considered in isolation, but the film itself is decidedly less than the sum of it's parts.

The film is divided into three acts. We're introduced to star professor of Hitler Studies Adam Driver and his wife Greta Gerwig and their children (almost all from different spouses) in the first act, which gestures at parodying academia without really landing much.

In the middle act, a train crash causes the Airborne Toxic Event ... a cloud of poisonous chemicals that descends on town and causes the family to evacuate. This is the most successful part of the film, impressively staging the event like a darkly comedic disaster film.

The final act is ... a lot less clear and probably best not spoiled. It deals with our need to distract ourselves from the terrors of life with medicine and consumerism. It descends into talky meandering and is really only saved by a magnificent musical number over the end credits.

There's really a lot to like. I found it to be intermittently quite funny. The performances are great, especially Don Cheadle as a fellow professor trying to establish a specialization in Elvis Studies. It's a hugely ambitious film with a unique visual style. I only wish I could say I actually liked it.

Most of the reviews that I have read thus far were negative, or a bit overly kind. The low rating is likely due to people going out for a light story, expecting to see a disaster action flick or end of the world comedy. This is essentially a reflection on mans fear of his own mortality, or perhaps more specifically on a certain subcultures fixation on their own impending end. If you take the movie as a series of reflections on that idea, and most of the characters as representations of certain personality types, perspectives and ideologies, then it all makes a lot of sense. And, it is pretty damn (darkly) funny as well. Enjoy.

What exactly does this film want to achieve? Why should the weird and sometimes paranoid look or angle of a director or script writer be something worth mentioning, let alone made into a movie? I honestly tried to see this movie with as clear a mind as I can... Is there something wrong with me? Is there some secret dimension hidden in this film that I (40 years old) can't grasp? Where is the director looking forward to? Amuse us? Entertain us? Drive us crazy? The last one, he succeeded! What did I watch? A strange, motley family whose members' dialogues use pretentious expressions full of disjointed, meaningless words and a tendency to impress even the teenagers of the family with their knowledge and strange inclinations! Do us a favor... We are not so easy to get. 1/10 from me.