'White Noise' travels well from page to screen

Noah Baumbach's film is successful in capturing the spirit of Don DeLillo's novel, one of the most dissected works of 20th century literature

- Aditya Mani Jha

The streaming era's mining of IP has meant that a lot of books considered 'unfilmable' by fans are now being adapted, and inventively so. Damon Lindelof's miniseries Watchmen, based on the eponymous graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is a case in point, as is Netflix's recent Sandman series. After Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated adaptation in the 1980s, people considered Frank Herbert's Dune novels to be similarly incompatible with the movies, but Denis Villeneuve's film was a big-screen spectacle like few others in recent times. We can now add Noah Baumbach's film White Noise (released last week on Netflix) to this list.

The film is based on Don DeLillo's 1985 novel of the same name, a defining work of American postmodernism and one of the most analysed and dissected works of 20th century literature. Most of the book (and indeed, the film, for this is a largely faithful adaptation) follows Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), a middle-aged, twice-divorced professor of Hitler Studies' living in an unnamed university town with his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their children. After an 'airborne toxic event' threatens to amplify Jack and Babette's already crippling fear of death, the two must confront their respective insecurities-as well as the preoccupations of 80s America; mind-numbing consumerism, media saturation, guns, prescription drugs and violence.