White Noise

Venice Film Festival #3 – PalaBiennale

“Elvis is my Hitler”

There’s a lot going on in this and while it’s all good, it just never really comes together as much as you want it to. After a disaster takes place Jack and his family have to evacuate their homes which makes Jack confront his mortality. That’s a sort of logline for the film, yet this part of the film doesn’t really happen until a third of the way through, and moreover it doesn’t really last that long either. It’s bookended by other plots which are attempting to tie together thematically. However, it’s not as clear how these ideas the film is contemplating tie together other than the fact that most of the film is about death. There’s no thematic throughline that keeps the film connected.

As far as Baumbach scripts go this just didn’t land as well as they normally do. Yes, the dialogue as usual is on point, perhaps more stylised than his more natural offerings, but the weakness comes from the disconnect between everything that’s going on. There’s threads about Hilter and Elvis, and the glorification of death when it comes to both those figures, there’s the idea of crashes in film, there’s the airborne toxic event and Babette’s struggle with drugs. All of which are great secularly, but together as a cohesive product, it just doesn’t come together.

The main part of the film though, Jack and Babette struggling with their mortality, is really where it shinesl. Helmed by two incredible performances from Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, along with the witty and profound dialogue of Baumbach’s, watching the two come to grips with their mortality in different ways was fun to watch. In particular Driver gives such a powerhouse of a performance, from the unnerving way he delivers his lectures to the overwhelming dread he faces, he’s a delight to watch as usual.

This is certainly Baumbach at his most extravagant. The filmmaking from a technical side is just phenomenal, it’s simply a natural escalation of his style. The gorgeous cinematography, the weird eerie score and the most lavish set pieces that are strange to watch in a Baumbach film. However, the standout aspect of the film has to be the sound. Very much in the vein of Uncut Gems, the film has so much overlapping dialogue which is perfectly used to heighten a state of stress or to simply to show family life. The way that dialogue flows from person to person and allows you to be guided along side the camera is amazing. There is probably sone attempt to make this thematically resonant, that all this noise is just background for the things that matter, but I don’t really feel the film conveyed that.

Standout of the film has to be the end credits sequence which is just so fun and set to an amazing song by LCD Soundsystem. This is another Baumbach project where people or animals dance in a supermarket