White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s latest film, is a warning to those who have become used to the current political climate. It was announced this week that Baumbach’s follow-up to his 2019 feature Marriage Story would open the Venice Film Festival on August 31. Film’s Twitter account shared a fresh first-look image from the film, which features Adam Driver as Professor Jack Gladney. An adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise is currently in production. Often considered DeLillo’s breakthrough work, this book earned the National Book Award for Fiction and sent his illustrious career as an author into high gear.
This is a novel and a film that depict the narrative of a Professor of Hitler Studies and his family as they face both huge and small-scale tragedies. With a wide-open-mouthed expression evocative of a Charles Burns drawing, Driver’s inept portrayal of middle-American Gladney is the first glimpse we’ve seen from the film, and it doesn’t disappoint. Greta Gerwig plays Babette, his wife, and they have four children. Although the image’s background is unknown, the wash of green that covers the frame strongly suggests that a chemical calamity is imminent. Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin, and Lars Edinger join Driver and Gerwig in the cast. “It is a very lovely thing to return to the Venice Picture Festival, and an unbelievable pleasure to have White Noise play as the opening night film,” director Noah Baumbach remarked. “It’s an honour and a delight to be a part of the incredible films and filmmakers that have premiered here,” he says.
According to Venice Film Festival chief Alberto Barbera, “adapted from the famous Don DeLillo novel, Baumbach has crafted an original, bold, and captivating piece of art that plays with a measure on numerous registers: tragic, sardonic, satirical.” A film that analyses our obsessions, questions, and worries as they were documented in the ’80s yet with very strong allusions to modern reality,” he concluded. The Venice Film Festival will begin on August 31 with White Noise. Netflix will then release the film.