White Noise is a head scratch of a movie. Something that will make you wonder if any of the actors had any idea what was going on during filming. Not that the plot is confusing, more the why of the events are open to unconvinced interpretation. I’m sure I liked parts of it, sure I lost interest eventually, and positive it has grand deeper meanings that were not immediately apparent on first watch.

Set in 1983 when both Krull and the A&P were going concerns, the film follows academic parents played by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. For awhile, the film is about a train derailment which releases a toxic cloud that delivers existential dread as it wanders aimlessly over a town. And then the movie’s not about that at all…

I think the movie might be saying how our lives can be turned upside down and then we all casually go back to normal because someone says its ok. But how normal is relative and we can always find a new way to self destruct if we look hard enough. I think. I dunno. Maybe it’s about grocery shopping and consumerism. Or just existential dread or the danger of losing one’s marriage.

It’s based on an apparently “unfilmable” book and I suspect they were right. But I’m not sure since I spent the majority of the movie mildly amused but not sure what point it was trying to make. I suspect something was lost in adaptation like inner thoughts and/or paragraphs upon paragraphs of analysis of modern life. Just a guess though.

Nobody in the film speaks like a real human being but, within those absurdist constraints, the actors do their jobs. I mean, whatever Gerwig and Driver are up to, at least I think they are playing it the way it was intended. Kind of an absurdly normal take on unreasonable events… where in any other movie, they’d be running around in a panic but instead these normal people react normal to the abnormal.

Or that’s what I’m going with. I’m afraid the film lost me in its second half… plot-wise, it was easy to follow, but the casual non-reality of the characters started to wear me down. I think there’s something interesting going on in the movie (or maybe just in the book). I was reasonably entertained… though your results may vary.

Score: 78