"White Noise," Noah Baumbach's jittery and inventive adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, begins with what you might call a love letter to cinema. We've had a lot of those recently, but this one — a college lecture on car crashes in American movies — is appreciably sharper, funnier and more specific than most. As his students watch a montage of fiery vehicular explosions, professor Murray Jay Siskind (a wonderful Don Cheadle) implores them to look past the violence and see the spirit of optimism and enterprise pulsing underneath: "There's a constant upgrading of tools, skills, a meeting of challenges," he marvels. "The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something loud and fiery, head-on."
Baumbach, a specialist in complicated human passions, appears to have taken the professor's enthusiasm to heart. Before long, he'll stage his own elemental pileup: An oil tanker truck T-bones a freight train, sending its chemical cargo flying every which way and igniting a conflagration that belches deadly black smoke into the sky. There's nothing optimistic about what happens next, but the moment of collision is executed with undeniable gusto; Baumbach does, for a moment, seem like the proverbial kid playing with a big honkin' train set. Here and elsewhere in "White Noise," he happily applies himself to the upgrading of tools and skills, and to the meeting of the formidable, some would say foolhardy, challenge before him.
DeLillo's novel — bursting with theories both prescient and otherwise about consumerism, addiction, environmental decay, (mis)information overload and the universal if also uniquely American fear of death — has long been deemed unfilmable, as novels of ideas are reflexively assumed to be. In this case, there's not only the danger of mishandling the author's satirical targets or the icy precision of his latex-glove sentences, but also the risk of approximating them too closely, of locking them away in a remote, often fondly nostalgized '80s moment and draining them of their corrosive, unsettling power.
