‘White Noise’ Review

There’s much to appreciate in Noah Baumbach’s alternately exhilarating and enervating attempt to tame Don DeLillo’s comedy of death, White Noise, not least the daredevil spirit and ambition with which the writer-director and his cast plunge into the tricky material. But little in this episodic freakout hits the target quite so well as the wild end credits sequence, a dance number set in a suburban A&P supermarket, in which the entire ensemble boogie in aisles stacked with colorful products, accompanied by an LCD Soundsystem banger called “New Body Rhumba.” With that ecstatic visual, Baumbach nails a key theme of the book — Americans seeking solace from their mortality in consumerism.

The 1984 novel is a postmodern satire of encroaching disquiet and cacophonous chaos that — particularly in its depiction of environmental catastrophe and human-made disasters — now seems even less like epochal paranoia than it did at the time. But although it’s crammed with characters and events, it’s also fundamentally a careening clown car of ideas, which is probably why it’s long been considered unfilmable.