Your death would leave an abyss in my life - I'd be left talking to chairs and pillows.

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2022

#26 : White Noise

Don DeLillo’s novel of campus larks and eco dread gets an elegant, droll film treatment from Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

I'm sure this is well done - and I'm not expecting to enjoy it in the slightest.  I'm not expecting to hate it either, just to find it a somewhat dry and literary chore.  Here's hoping to being proved wrong...

Well, having watched it, I wouldn't describe it as dry and literary.  In fact, I'm not at all sure how I would describe it.  I feel it's probably trying to say something clever about environmental matters or fear or death, but I'm completely confused as to what that might be.  I'm going to give you what some might consider spoilers, but I suspect they'll be very unlikely to spoil anything for anyone.  

Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, who is married to Babette and they have four kids from various marriages.  Jack is a professor of Hitler studies, yet speaks no German and Babette is taking a drug that no-one has any information about.  They're both concerned about death, which isn't helped by a train crash which causes a toxic cloud to be released so they all have to evacuate to a summer camp.  And then they go home again and it turns out Babette has been sleeping with a guy to get this drug, so Jack goes to shoot him which ends up with them going to see some nuns who find the idea of God ridiculous.  And then they all have a dance in a supermarket.

It's all very stylish, but it makes not a single jot of sense.  Not a jot.  Seriously, this makes ABSOLUTELY no sense at all - not to me at least.  It's also incredibly wordy, which when it makes no sense gets very tiresome.  I didn't entirely hate it because I was quite intrigued to see if it was going to make any sense - but when it didn't, I did feel a bit annoyed that it had wasted my time.

The acting seems quite hammy at times, but given the quality of the actors involved and the general lack of sense, I feel like they're doing what they've been told to do - but maybe they just shouldn't have.  The kids all acquit themselves well enough given that Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are their parents - Raffey Cassidy as Denise does enough to get a namecheck for me.  And Don Cheadle looks very stylish as a professor of car crashes - or something.

As I previously said, it is very stylish and a lot of work has gone into making it look good - there's a sequence where Jack is searching through the rubbish and there's some incredible looking shots.  For a load of rubbish!  If only they'd put so much effort into the script, particularly plot-wise - the dialogue is a bit odd at times, but I can forgive it.  I can imagine that the original source may be hard to convert into a film (I've never read any DeLillo novels - but some serious US authors are impenetrable), but in that case just try and adapt something else.

Overall, I can't quite decide about this - I feel I should hate it, but it's more the case that I'm mildly intrigued as to why it happened.  Not enough to actually investigate the reason or anything, but if anyone knows feel free to tell me.  I'm certainly not going to recommend it to anyone - part of the point of me doing this is to save you from such films, so feel free to continue with your lives happy that you haven't wasted any time on this.  If you're desperate to ignore my wise advice then it's on Netflix - but don't say I didn't warn you...

#27 - A very confusing film
#25 - A tender tale that draws you in