White Noise (2023)

Direction: Noah Baumbach
Country: USA 

In White Noise, Oscar-winning writer-director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, 2012; Marriage Story, 2019) probes a different style, attempting to charm with adventure, crime thriller, and family comedy. The outcome of his first-ever adaptation is too theoretical and uneven to subsist. With Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name in mind, and showcasing an excellent pair of actors like Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, Baumbach couldn’t quite handle the odd material. The course of events is perhaps excessively elaborated and the dramatic stakes feel rather low.  

The story, set in the 1980s, focuses on the Gladneys and how they react to a hazardous cloud of deadly chemicals, the fear of death (who thought of Woody Allen?), and the physical and psychological effects of an experimental drug not listed in the pharmacies. Jack (Driver) is a Nazism expert and professor who enjoys knotty chatting with his Elvis-devotee fellow, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle); Babette (Gerwig), who normally reveals and confides, is visibly depressed as she goes through a difficult phase marked by insecurity and obscurity.

With its derivative style and witless plot-twists, the film aspires to be grandiose, comprehensive, and clever but falls flat. Baumbach quickly loses control of his film and often struggles to keep the story afloat, leaving us on the sidelines. White Noise is a disjointed and deliberately delirious monument, whose ambition is overburdened with messed-up ideas and genres, and whose required excitement becomes a tricky thing to pull off. In the end, this offbeat journey has no discernible point, and the only thing one can enjoy is the actors’ qualified performances.

Marriage Story (2019)

Direction: Noah Baumbach
Country: USA

What makes Marriage Story so remarkable is the incredible capacity to balance a variety of moods with intimacy and candidness. The film is not just a showcase for Noah Baumbach’s competent writing, direction, and storytelling, but also for the gripping performances by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver.

The narrative starts off with the married couple and protagonists, Nicole (Johansson), a talented actress, and Charlie (Driver), a rising theater director, telling us what they like about each other. Despite the still constructive feelings and words of praise written down for a marital mediator, it becomes quite clear over time that the divorce is an irreversible decision for Nicole. However, what could have been an amiable procedure if kept between them, becomes a costly, hostile, and inglorious coast-to-coast legal battle led by aggressive lawyers - formidably portrayed by Laura Dern and Ray Liotta.

Amidst all the susceptibility and suffering created by the situation itself, there are witty scenes, some involving Nicole’s family members - her mother Sandra (Julie Hagerty) and sister Cassie (Merritt Wever) - and a particularly awkward one marked by blood and deadpan humor. Everything works perfectly, except the redundant musical episodes, the only aspect I would discard.

Sporting that pungent emotional punch we seek to experience in a study of a decaying marriage, the film fulfilled my expectations and the audiences certainly won’t forget how heartbreaking a separation can be. Marriage Story is among the best of 2019.

The Meyerowitz Stories (2017)

Directed by Noah Baumbach
Country: USA

Noah Baumbach is an American writer/director with a knack for witty dramas, usually loaded with amazing characters and a driven emotional content. These are the cases of “The Squid and the Whale”, “Greenberg”, “Frances Ha”, and “Mistress America”, irresistible highlights of an admirable filmography.

His new film, “The Meyerowitz Stories” showcases a brilliant cast with Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Emma Thompson in the main roles and depicts with ups and downs the gathering of an estranged, dysfunctional family that has the elderly patriarch as a model.

Harold Meyerowitz (Hoffman) is a retired art professor and established sculptor whose work is frequently exhibited at MoMA and Whitney Museum. However, like most of the artists, he seems never satisfied with what he achieves and shows signs of pickiness, selfishness, and petulance in several details related to his life, past and present.

Harold lives with his third wife, Maureen (Thompson), a gem of a person but also an incorrigible alcoholic. Suddenly, their house is invaded by the arrival of Harold’s son, Danny (Sandler), an uninspired, jobless loafer who could have been a great pianist and just feels disoriented after separating from his wife. He and his sister, Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), whom nobody pays much attention to, were always the ugly ducklings of the family. All the attention went to their half-brother, Matthew (Stiller), a successful accountant in L.A., who still bears a little grudge against his father due to past issues. Notwithstanding, he’s peremptory when affirming: “I don’t get angry anymore. Now it’s kind of funny to be with him because I have my own business, a wonderful kid, and I live three thousand miles away from him.”

Everyone in the family deals with an unexpected shake-up when Harold has to be transported to the hospital with a chronicle hematoma in his head. This mishap coincides with a group show at the Bard College, where his most famous piece, wryly entitled ‘Matthew’, is one of the attractions. There, his sons take the opportunity to talk publicly, yet, instead of focusing on their father or his work, they open up about themselves and how they feel as his sons, good and bad. While Baumbach devises this scene with a purposely increase of dramatization, the scene that precedes it, a brothers' fight, feels nonsensically overstaged.

The humorous side relies solely on Danny’s daughter, Eliza (Grace Van Patten), an unflinching self-starter and talented videographer whose artistic work exhibits a very naughty sexual content.

Baumbach set the dialogues with interesting lines and the pretentiousness of the artistic milieu is perfectly calibrated. Even without digging too much, it’s easy for us to find humanity and even warm-heartedness among the family members, regardless the emotional instability that follows them like shadows. Although lacking the habitual attractive charm and magic spell that made Baumbach a treasure of the contemporary American cinema, “The Meyerowitz Stories” is perfectly good to watch, demonstrating a genuine keenness to amuse.