It’s not hard to see why Noah Baumbach, our foremost movie satirist of the body neurotic, would have Don DeLillo’s 1986 novel “White Noise” in his sights for adaptation — especially so after the pandemic seemed to bring stark new resonance to the author’s prescient, all-too-human black comedy about a dysfunctional family in distracted, anxious, consumerist America enduring an “airborne toxic event.”
What’s harder to accept about this ideal blend of filmmaker and material — in a way, rounding out a trilogy about cracked-but-surviving families following Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories” and “Marriage Story” — is that it’s impressive in its filmic warp and woof but falls short getting under our skin the way the novel immortalized with joking seriousness our collective “brain-fade” and how each of us handle the fear of death.
Although it starts with a Baumbach-added, DeLillo-appropriate prologue in which Don Cheadle’s liberal arts college professor Murray waxes