Almost two decades in development, “White Noise,” a film adaptation on the acclaimed 1985 novel by American author Don DeLillo (“Libra”) arrives, and it is probably doomed at the box office, in spite of being one of the most relevant, personal and accomplished films of the year.
Like Alejandro Inarritu’s semi-autobiographical “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” “White Noise” is going to vex a lot of viewers with its blocks of overlapping dialogue that come across as Robert Altman 2.0 and its at times queasy mix of family comedy, horror and satire. Example: The film opens with the words, “Okay, roll film.” We are in a class at the College-on-the-Hill somewhere in the Midwest. Cheroot-smoking Professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) is showing students clips of car crashes from American films and explaining how such violence can be “innocent and fun.”
Get ready for a lot more innocent and fun stuff. We meet Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a “Hitler Studies” master, who may be the college’s most prominent figure, his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), who teaches “posture classes,” and their “blended” family, featuring four children. Meanwhile, a half drunk tanker-trailer driver crashes into a nearby train carrying more tanker trailers, causing a chain-reaction catastrophe that could kill people exposed to its noxious cloud.
