Following on from 2019's more straightforward and surprisingly poignant Marriage Story, here Baumbach decides to throw absolutely everything into the pot, so the basic set-up of an overly loquacious family of an anxious academic, his wife with a secret and their cleverclogs children is overlaid with an ecocatastrophe, parallels drawn between Elvis and Hitler, right-wing conspiracy theorists, religious and philosophical musings about the nature of death, sensations of déjà vu, ADHD, the cult of self-medication, modern information overload and mindless consumerism. Amongst other things. The influence of late '70s Woody Allen, Baumbach's self-professed biggest one, is clearly still there, most particularly in the preponderance of rapid-fire intellectualising conversations that veer wildly from topic to topic, but by now Baumbach has decided to try to cover everything. The overall result is definitively the white noise of the title, so mission achieved in a sense, and the sheer audacity is quite something to behold. While the flitting may grate at many junctures, it never stops being watchable. This is considerably helped by the director casting his stalwart regular, a quite unrecognisable Adam Driver, in the role of the middle-aged father.
In short, cinematic Marmite. Which I like.
7/10
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