“Background Noise”: Noah Baumbach’s hysterical medley in which Adam Driver shines

Disaster cinema has seen a bonanza in the covid-19 pandemic to be able to continue to annihilate the world’s population and destroy civilizations as we know them. A clear and recent example is ‘Don’t look up’, the satire on the end of the world that has left no one indifferent. Maybe that’s why Noah Baumbach has seen fit to direct, at the hands of Netflix, ‘Background noise’, adaptation of the novel by Don DeLillo (which in Spain has been translated as ‘white noise’), a writer known for the surrealism he gives to his works. Another famous case of adaptation was ‘Cosmopolis’, by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson. However, ‘Ruido de Fondo’ only uses a disaster movie parody to talk about (or try to) something bigger: the emotional goings-on of an intellectual family, the fear of its protagonist’s death and the disasters of marriage. Getting … is another matter.

Netflix welcomes this risky production based on a few seemingly reliable names. And is that Baumbach is well known to all. The American director has presented himself to the world with films such as ‘A Brooklyn Story’, ‘Margot and the Wedding’ or ‘While We’re Young’, where he tackled the metaphysics of the couple themselves and the disagreements that arise in all courtships. For ‘Frances Ha’, which really put her on the Hollywood industry map, she had director Greta Gerwig (‘Lady Bird’, ‘Little Women’), her current partner; Since then, they have collaborated again on ‘Mistress America’ and on the script of the upcoming ‘Barbie’, one of the most anticipated films of 2023. But, without a doubt, His consecration came with another Netflix original, ‘Marriage Story’for which he won three Golden Globes and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

For this story he relied on both Gerwig and his fetish actor. Adam Driver plays Jack, a family-oriented college professor who is married to Babbette (Gerwig), a woman with trouble remembering things.. This idyllic modern couple has several children from previous marriages and they have all come together in a kind of “Los Serrano” but living in a bucolic and peaceful chalet. Everything runs smoothly until catastrophe occurs: a giant cloud in pure ‘NOP’ style floods the city and causes a general evacuation. From that moment on, the family will have to stick together and, most importantly, the marriage between Babbette and Jack will be put to the test while the professor, the leading American expert on the figure of Adolf Hitler, will have to face his fear of death. .

The thing starts well. Jack, despite being a professor of “Hitlerology”, cannot speak German, which causes him great embarrassment because he does not stop lecturing on the Nazi dictator. Similarly, his partner and friend Siskind (Don Cheadle), another expert on a 20th century icon like Elvis Presley, wants to do the same himself, so he enlists his help. Under his friend’s axiom, “The family is the cradle of universal disinformation”Jack tries to untie the dialectical knots that bind his family. Meanwhile, his wife Babbette appears to be on drugs for a problem that the public is still unaware of, and their children, played by Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola and May Nivola, don’t stop asking their parents questions, snooping around and speculating. compulsively about everything around him. From this premise Baumbach begins to play.

Dysfunctional family (and plot)

Develop the plot on the basis of a book whose subplots overwhelm, but not in quantity, but in intensity. The script of ‘Ruido de Fondo’ seems convoluted and dense. Their unwieldy dialogues devour each other, trample on each other; everything veers towards an unbearable uproar where the viewer does not know what to pay attention to in order to find out what is happening. Especially children, because their motivations and questions are boring to say the least, making their empty chatter a (precisely) background noise that never ceases to annoy. The dysfunctionality of the family is somehow hidden by the intellectual condition of its members. They live in a suburb, read books and always have a witty answer to come back with. That anti-musicality that children’s sentences release (at times, it seems that they recite Wikipedia articles like trained parrots) is mixed with the extramarital problems that Gerwig and Driver’s characters will gather. It’s like ‘Marriage Story’ and ‘Captain Fantastic’ had a child but he was awkward, hasty, hyperactive and condescending.

When a strange cloud of toxic dust forces the entire neighborhood to evacuate, ‘Ruido de Fondo’ satirizes disaster movies, getting as much comic juice as possible, and at times, succeeding, thanks in large part to the good work of Adam Driver . However, the storyline will go on without much regard for this event, as well as giving Jack’s character a horrific fear of death. This fact only accentuates the hysterical mix of merging different genres. ‘Behind Noise’ is meant to be a satire of the idealized American family, it is meant to be a disaster movie parody to portray society as messy nonsense, it is meant to be (pushing towards the third act) a racial thriller with cinematic black undertones. What results is it an amalgam of ideas and intentions which, rather than a fluid narrative experience, is deposited in the collective imagination like an avalanche of extrasensory data which destroys every positive root.

And, despite everything, it has good things. Baumbach continues to take care of his staging down to the smallest detail and Driver continues to remind the industry that he is a great comedic actor (no matter how well he performs in other genres as well). But ‘Background noise’ is a failed film that struggles to find the right tone and tries to make a virtue out of it. Always poised between comedy and drama, Baumbach seeks to tame and depict society’s chaotic status quo and its miseries. But, at least in this film, it seems that society and its miseries impose themselves.

Note: 5

The best: Adam Driver and Baumbach’s staging.

Worse: The dead end representing a dense and cumbersome script.