Tag: Noah Baumbach

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White Noise

White Noise. (L-R) Greta Gerwig as Babette, Raffey Cassidy as Denise, May Nivola as Steffie, Sam Nivola as Heinrich and Adam Driver as Jack in White Noise. (Photo: Netflix © 2022)

In 1985, when Don DeLillo wrote his acclaimed novel White Noise, it was considered an absurdist comedy. When you’re watching Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of White Noise, you will have moments of startling deja vu. What was considered over-the-top crazy in 1985 is now just stuff that happens in everyday life.

DeLillo’s “hero,” if you want to call him that, is Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a prominent professor of “Hitler Studies” at a Midwestern liberal arts college. Both he and his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) are on their fourth marriages, so their four children live in an extremely mixed family. Luckily, the kids seem to get along well, bonded by their shared love of televised disasters. Plane crashes, floods, fires — the deadlier the better, says this household of typical viewers.

But disasters are only fun to watch at a safe remove. When they’re actually happening to you, it’s a different story. A few miles from the Gladney residence, a drunken trucker accidentally rams his tanker into a train full of chemicals. At first, Jack doesn’t believe the “airborne toxic event” is going to be a problem. Desperate evacuations to grubby refugee camps is something that happens to people in Haiti, not affluent Midwesterners. Even the frantic call from a National Guard truck to “evacuate immediately!” is an annoyance because it comes in the middle of dinner.

Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle deliver performances that hit a little too close for comfort in this absurdist comedy. 

For those of us who just lived through the pandemic, the Airborne Toxic Event feels like prophecy. The authorities can’t even agree on what to call it at first, and the name they settle on is comically ambiguous. The ever-changing signs of exposure to the toxic cloud include vague things like “unexplained deja vu” — when Steffie (May Nivola) experiences tingling in her extremities, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) accuses her of experiencing “outdated symptoms.” Even the anticlimactic end of the event seems familiar. One day, everyone is just allowed back to their homes, and not much else is said about the whole affair.

For his 11th film, Baumbach has taken on an extremely high degree of difficulty in adapting a beloved, but prickly, literary masterpiece. He leans heavily on Driver, who delivers with his usual intensity. You might not think “team teaching a college class on the parallels between Hitler and Elvis” sounds like good fodder for a cinematic experience, but Driver and Don Cheadle, who plays Jack’s frenemy professor Murray, make it riveting.

Gerwig and Baumbach are a couple, and judging from Lady Bird and Little Women, she is every bit his equal as a director. (Her $100 million Barbie movie drops next summer.) Babette gets pushed aside, in favor of Jack’s comically exaggerated narcissism. During her big scene, in which she confesses her drug addiction and affair, a stunned Jack can only repeat, “This is not Babette’s purpose.” DeLillo intended Jack to be an affectionate parody of the many “white guys who teach college” protagonists of literary novelists like Raymond Carver and John Irving. But after the Trump era, his unexamined selfishness seems uglier, and less funny.

Even though Jack and Babette’s lives continue to become more surreal and more complex, the film never really matches the energy of the A.T.E. I often quote the Hitchcock adage that mediocre books make the best movies. Works of literary genius that depend on wordsmithery usually get lost in translation. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is the exception that proves the rule.) Baumbach’s White Noise is dense and wordy. He creates some unlikely thrilling moments. I’m not sure what it all means, or if it holds together, but I do know that I’m still thinking about it, and I want to watch it again.

White Noise
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Mistress America

Mistress America is director Noah Baumbach’s second film released this year. The first, While We’re Young, was a modest hit that starred Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as filmmakers caught between the legacy of their parents’ and, as James Murphy says, “The kids coming up from behind.” Stiller finds himself invigorated when he befriends a younger documentarian, played by Adam Driver, but their friendship ultimately curdles into jealousy and mistrust as Stiller sees the more unpleasant aspects of his personality reflected in Driver’s characters’ ambitious nature.

Mistress America is the female version of While We’re Young. Tracy (Lola Kirke) is an 18-year-old college freshman who has just moved to New York to attend Barnard. But her first few weeks of school are filled with awkwardness and rejection. She’s an aspiring writer but doesn’t get accepted to the Mobius Literary Society. The guy she’s kind of into, Tony (Michael Shear), has another girl. And her mother is getting married to a guy she barely knows and asks her to meet her new stepsister-to-be, Brooke (Greta Gerwig).

Greta Gerwig and Lola Kirke in Mistress America

Brooke is a whirlwind of a person who seems to know where all the cool parties are in Manhattan; a self-starter who taught herself the word “autodidact”; a spin class instructor; and a tutor whose advice to a struggling algebra student is “X doesn’t roll like that, because X can’t be pinned down.” What she really wants to be is a restauranteur. She’s planning on opening a restaurant called Mom’s that will be a community center and eatery where she’ll “keep the hearth.”

Tracy is entranced by Brooke, and the pair fall into an intense relationship. When one of Brooke’s investors pulls out of the restaurant over an ill-timed Instagram picture, Tracey convinces Tony to let them use his car to drive to Greenwich, Connecticut to convince a pair of Brooke’s friends, Dylan (Michael Chernus) and Mamie-Claire (Heather Lind), to partner with Brooke. The trip descends into fiasco and puts a strain on their relationship.

The center of Mistress America is Gerwig, who came up from the indie scene after turning heads in 2007’s Hannah Takes the Stairs. Gerwig, also the film’s co-writer, has an electrifying screen presence that she and Baumbach put to good use in their first collaboration, 2012’s Frances Ha, where she was the uncertain young woman trying to fit in. But in this film, Brooke is the spirit of New York personified, always looking to the next hustle, living for the future while ignoring the more squalid aspects of her present life. Brooke seems like what Frances would have grown into, and I think it’s a missed opportunity to not make Mistress America a sequel to Frances Ha, as that would have given the character more depth.

Gerwig is her usual bright self. The big discovery in this film is Kirke. Kirke skillfully draws Tracy’s emotional arc, from intimidated college girl to confident young writer. She gives herself over to Gerwig’s deadpan dialog, nailing lines like: “That’s cool about the frozen yogurt machine. Everyone I love dies.”

The other great turn is by Lind whose character struck it rich and moved to the exurbs. Once the action moves to Connecticut, it becomes a chamber comedy for a while. Brooke and Tracy navigate an unfamiliar social world, while Mamie-Claire tries to keep her husband from blowing money on the restaurant.

Like Woody Allen in the 1970s, Baumbach’s films tend to revolve around the well-to-do in New York, shooting thick, witty dialog and gags like an art movie. Like Allen, his characters can sometimes be grating and blinkered. But Mistress America powers through the occasional rough spots on Gerwig’s determination, unlike her character, not to take it all too seriously.

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While We’re Young

So, Generation X is pushing middle age now. It’s okay. Our pop culture has been preparing us for it since the 1980s. The tone of Noah Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young is not that different from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that appropriated the name of Billy Idol’s first band and applied to us. Coupland’s cast of self-destructive, 20-something slackers had been told all their lives that they didn’t have it as good as their parents, the Baby Boomers. Their internalized, preemptive disappointment often looked like nihilism from the outside, but from the inside, it felt like fighting back with the only tool we had: refusal. The Baby Boomers wanted to change the world for the better, but it didn’t work out like they planned. We decided to opt out of the aspects of America we found stale and rancid. We took our characteristically defeatist motto from Nirvana: “Oh well/Whatever/Nevermind.” If our grandparents who won World War II were the Greatest Generation, we were the Grumpiest Generation.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

For Ben Stiller’s character Josh, the preemptive disappointment of the 1990s has given way to the muddled malaise of the 2010s. He’s a filmmaker whose first documentary Power Elite was well received by critics but is now available only via VHS tapes for sale on eBay. He’s been working on his follow-up doc for eight years now, but it’s still six hours long, and when he tries to explain what it’s about, he can only say, “It’s about America.” His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a movie producer who works with her father, a storied documentarian from the film verité days named Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin). Josh’s resentment of his father-in-law’s success and his own relative obscurity means they don’t get along very well, but otherwise, he and Cornelia seem to have a pretty good life in Brooklyn. But when their friends Fletcher (The Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz) and Marina (Maria Dizzia) have a baby, it brings some of their discontent bubbling to the surface.

That’s when Josh meets Jamie (Adam Driver) while delivering a lecture to indifferent college students, in a scene that recalls Holly Hunter’s ill-fated speech on journalistic integrity in Broadcast News. Jamie is an up-and-coming documentarian who has actually seen Power Elite. The two hit it off, and soon Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) are hanging out with Josh and Cornelia on the regular, despite their 20-year age difference. Josh and Cornelia find themselves reinvigorated by their new friends, who have a spark of youth they seem to have lost. “They have all the stuff we threw out,” Cornelia says of their vinyl-listening, VHS-watching new besties. “It just looks so much better in their space.”

Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

Baumbach’s been directing arch indie comedies about uncertain slackers since 1995’s Kicking & Screaming, but While We’re Young seems like a welcome departure for the auteur. He first collaborated with Stiller on 2010’s Greenberg, but this time around the tone is more generous and extroverted. Stiller successfully walks (and sometimes pratfalls) the line between sympathetic and jerky, but by the end he seems to have grown — something that doesn’t always happen in a Baumbach film. Watts brilliantly brings depth and charm to a character who, in lesser hands, could come across as underwritten. Crucially, she and Stiller are totally believable as a couple who’ve been together for a while, but who are still in love. Girls co-star Driver just seems to get better and better, and he is great as the younger, hungrier version of Stiller’s Josh. Grodin represents the older, more successful version of Josh, and when it becomes clear that he has more in common with the hustler Jamie than his fussy perfectionism, it only fuels Josh’s resentment and pushes him into greater, more hilarious humiliations. The most surprising performance is by a bearded Horovitz as a wide-eyed new father. Who knew Ad-Rock could act? But that’s the charm of While We’re Young: It starts off as a familiar comedy of postmodern manners before opening up and embracing a wider world. Cheer up, it says to Gen X. Everybody’s in the same boat. Get over yourselves.

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Not for the Faint of Heart

Margot at the Wedding is Noah Baumbach’s darkest film yet, a group atrocity wherein smug, aloof Margot (Nicole Kidman), her sharp-tongued hippie sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her sister’s brooding fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black), and a trio of confused and awkward teenagers from numerous failed marriages and couplings gather for an ostensibly festive occasion, only to spit deadly venom for as long as they can stand to be around each other. The film is so unrelenting in its emphasis on the worst human characteristics that it achieves a kind of diseased purity, like a perfectly round open sore.

Speaking of unpleasant images, Margot at the Wedding is maybe the ugliest movie I’ve seen all year. It’s frequently shot with handheld cameras in natural light, which would have been fine if anyone bothered to check the weather outside or the light levels in any of the rooms inside. As a result, the interior scenes are so dark that everyone seems to read their lines while scuttling around the crawlspace under the house, where most of the film takes place. The actors contribute to this deliberately ugly mise-en-scène, too; it looks like everyone was allowed to work in whatever clothes they slept in the night before.

So Margot at the Wedding is not much to look at. But it’s a defiantly written, defiantly literary film. The characters snap off their barbs like chorus gals snapping off line kicks, and everyone is constantly jostling for the emotional upper hand. Kidman and Leigh’s moments together play like scenes from an endless horror show they’ve been restaging since they were kids. Both sisters use the past to wound each other, dredging up unpleasant memories and revising their own futures by standing atop their sibling’s shamed carcass.

Everyone in the movie carves out personal space through hostile insults, and no one does it better than Pauline’s groom-to-be, a sloppy, half-assed provocateur who is eventually revealed as the most craven one in the bunch. They all feint and dodge in a world where a line like “No one fills the ice-cube trays” is tossed out as a deadly gambit. We’ve been here before, just not in many movies. Think of playwright Edward Albee’s bitter, frustrated marrieds or John Cheever stories gone bananas or furtive John Updike scribblings even he couldn’t publish.

I can’t say that I would want see such an ugly, mean-spirited movie again. But I also can’t say I’ve seen a recent film so single-minded in its unpleasantness; there isn’t a hint of compromise in it. I’m always shocked at people who can laugh at such desperate, pathetic verbal sparring, but I’m told this film accurately depicts a kind of communicatory rawness common among East Coast residents at a certain level of intellectual force and emotional weakness. Fair enough. Best to wave goodbye to this film, admire it from a safe distance, and let it saunter along and frighten people in one art house after another, rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

Margot at the Wedding

Opens Friday, December 21st

Studio on the Square