Deadpan death sweats

In any cinematic adaptation of a novel it is interesting to see which choices have been made, and which forced on the director. What has been kept, and what dropped? What changed, and what added? Noah Baumbach, in his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), a darkly comic postmodernist novel, faces unusual challenges and makes some intelligent decisions.

The novel works not so much in the advancing of a plot (“To plot is to die, whether we know it or not”, remarks one character) as in the accumulation of an atmosphere: of anxiety, especially thanatophobia; and of love, especially familial love. Jack Gladney is a fiftysomething academic in a small university town, head of the department of Hitler studies, which he invented. He and his wife, Babette, live with a son and two daughters from each other’s earlier marriages, and their own son, Wilder. The only other main characters (the film drops sundry minor relatives) are academics, in particular Jack’s friend Murray Siskind, who is trying to establish the discipline of Elvis studies.

Little actually happens. The novel drifts between striking set pieces: a visit to “the most photographed barn in America”; a disconcertingly funny duet between Jack (Adam Driver) and Murray (Don Cheadle) in a seminar, establishing parallels between Hitler and Elvis; the chaotic evacuation of the town when a toxic cloud starts floating towards it; the discovery of Babette’s secret addiction to an experimental drug, Dylar, and the infidelities she has committed in exchange for it from “Mr Gray”; and a motel-room confrontation between Jack and “Mr Gray”, in which shots are fired. But moments of real climax somehow fail to arrive, and really these are occasions for the characters’ quirky meditations on life – an entertaining mishmash of profundity and glibness, fact and error.

Baumbach’s first decision is to set the film in the 1980s, and not to update the book. His allusions are to an iconography of the time, one that has been faithfully rendered repeatedly since. The cars, the clothes, the supermarket aisles – all very consciously reproduced in neat geometric patterns, big canvases and bold colours. To establish the novel’s deepening sense of unease, Baumbach uses familiar tropes from horror movies – flickering neon signs, red-tinged cloud, sudden eruptions of static and hiss on television sets – and allusions. The evacuation ahead of the toxic cloud contains some clear nods to Spielberg’s Close Encounters, including a casually glanced-at cymbal-holding toy monkey, and the film is saturated with familiar motifs.

In its allusiveness and playfulness this is retro postmodernism. Baumbach has dropped the “most photographed barn in America”, but in a sense he has instead offered what sometimes feels like “the most filmed decade in American cinema”. He is intent on offering the cinematic equivalent of DeLillo’s literary techniques. The film opens with a segment from halfway through the book, Murray’s analysis of car crashes in American cinema: “Watch any car crash in any American movie … The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach. Look past the violence. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun”. And there are several crashes and collisions in the film ahead, nearly all of them in the novel, but more garish and prominent when played out on screen, most notably the explosion of a tanker of chemicals, which produces the “airborne toxic event” forcing the Gladney family’s evacuation; this happens off stage in the book, but Baumbach gives it the full treatment.

White Noise is a funny book, remarkably so given the air of incipient catastrophe that hangs over it; Baumbach retains a lot of DeLillo’s smart, deadpan humour and adds a little cinematic amusement of his own, sometimes taking a fleeting line from the novel and doing much more with it. “I woke in the grip of a death sweat” is elaborated into a startling few minutes of nightmarish hallucination. “The car forded a creek which I didn’t know was there” is extended into an alternately comical and anxiety-inducing passage in which the car floats helplessly, bumping from rock to rock, until someone wonders if there might be a waterfall ahead, and elicits one of Baumbach’s few wholly original lines of dialogue – a desperate cry of “doesn’t anyone want to pay attention to what is actually happening?”.

Faithful as the film is – to the period, to the dialogue, to what passes for plot – Baumbach ultimately makes his own choice of emphasis, in his most notable departure from DeLillo. In the book, when Jack finds Mr Gray (Lars Eidinger) in the motel and botches the murder, he ends up taking Gray to a hospital run by atheist German nuns. The passage manages to be both tense and bathetic, and casually glances at a similar scene in Lolita. Baumbach rather smartly takes that allusion further – Gray appears, Quilty-like, around the edges of several earlier scenes in the film – but by introducing Babette (Greta Gerwig) to the motel-hospital fiasco he also enables a redemptive moment in which the couple successfully overcome the threat to their marriage.

The film is able to conclude with “secular optimism”, the family together, with all the cast of the film, in the supermarket: and the decontextualized, repurposed line “Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope” introduces a triumphant, exhilarating credit-sequence dance number courtesy of LCD Soundsystem. Collisions have been replaced by choreography. It’s far louder and more upbeat than the novel’s ending, but it retains something of the ambiguity – these are, after all, people behaving robotically in a cathedral of empty consumerism – and honours, as it has throughout, DeLillo’s furtively affirming portrait of family.