Despite relevant ideas, 'White Noise' offers little more than static

“All plots lead to death,” says Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) in response to a student about a historical conspiracy.

This line of dialogue is more like a mission statement for Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel “White Noise,” released on Netflix in the past week.

It is a sprawling movie that examines the topic of dying as a theory versus dying as a reality and how that disconnect affects the characters. This is one of many intriguing ideas brought forward by the filmmakers that don’t quite land because the film’s scope falls outside Baumbach’s strengths as a writer-director.

The setting is a college town in the mid-1980s, which is when DeLillo’s novel was published. Gladney is a professor of something called Hitler Studies that probably seemed pretty shocking 40 years ago, but sounds plausible now. I mean, you’d probably take one of those classes.

No matter what question his students pose, his answer comes back to a meditation of death. Why did so many people flock to Hitler’s speeches?

“It was an escape from dying alone,” Gladney says with a hint of melancholy.

I would love to debate this point, but that’s not my job as a critic. I am just reporting on the intellectual drivel in the script.

Gladney’s homelife is portrayed with chaos. He and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), raise four kids with various anxieties and maladies. Babette is making a mysterious prescription that many of the family stumbles upon but cannot figure out what it is treating.

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Then a train crashes and a poisonous cloud heads towards the town. Authorities call it an Airborne Toxic Event and that’s when I learned where that alt-rock band got their name!

At first, Gladney explains to his family that the authorities are overreacting and there is nothing to worry about. But then, things become dire and Gladney perhaps faces the real threat of death for the first time. The rest of the film deals with how he and his family — specifically Babette — deal with this revelation.

While “White Noise” exists in the past, the themes are ripe for a contemporary audience. An airborne illness paralyzes a community and throws ordinary lives in disarray? Sounds like something we went through recently. Am unhealthy fascination with charismatic fascists? That’s also on many people’s minds. Watching the characters grapple with the larger implications of these ideas is provocative.

Even if the result isn’t very effective. I go back to Baumbach’s capacity and think of his 2019 “Marriage Story.” That’s a very quiet, personal film about divorce that connects the audience to its emotional current. Real, raw material handled in a serious way. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad. Always compelling.

“Marriage Story” is Baumbach’s best film, but you can see the honest touches he puts on smaller films with “The Squid and the Whale,” “Frances Ha," and “While We’re Young.”

“White Noise” is a film you get to make when “Marriage Story” wins Netflix some highly sought-after Oscar clout. The budget is big with a canvas to match. I don’t blame Baumbach for tackling a big film from what is considered an “unfilmable” book. Flex your muscles and swing for the fences, I say.

But striking out when you want to hit a home run doesn’t make your film worth watching. It could be the source material, though the DeLillo novel is un-read by me. I picked up a DeLillo novel once and found his form of convoluted and dense writing as intentionally inaccessible. As though he wrote in code in order to obfuscate its flimsy ideas.

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The novel has a following; some call it a masterpiece. Baumbach is a more straightforward writer and ventures away from DeLillo’s more maddening prose after the first act; a first act that finds Baumbach emulating a Robert Altman-style of meandering camerawork and overlapping dialogue. But Baumbach incorporates this style to overwhelm the audience, not to show the intricacies of the characters' lives.

By the time the film gets to the third act, the story calms down and there is not direct dialogue between the actors. Here’s where “White Noise” excels as a real human drama. But we're already quite a ways into a two hour-plus film.

Although it’s not just the source material or the directing. Driver's casting as Gladney doesn’t quite work. He is oddly handsome and stoic; the character is older, softer and stranger than Driver can play. While he is one of the better screen actors of his generation, this feels like a mismatch for the more-than-capable Driver.

There’s a lot to appreciate about “White Noise” without really being able to recommend it. I liked the ending that exists as a video for the new LCD Soundsystem song while not totally being sure how that fits with the rest of the film.

Even with an argument that all plots lead to death, the plot in “White Noise” leads to dancing in a grocery store. By this point, the credits were rolling and I was already resigned.

James Owen is the Tribune’s film columnist. In real life, he is a lawyer and executive director of energy policy group Renew Missouri. A graduate of Drury University and the University of Kansas, he created Filmsnobs.com, where he co-hosts a podcast. He enjoyed an extended stint as an on-air film critic for KY3, the NBC affiliate in Springfield, and now regularly guests on Columbia radio station KFRU.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Netflix adaptation of 'White Noise' offers little more than static