There's nothing quite so rapturous in White Noise – Noah Baumbach's fidgety, fastidious adaptation of Don DeLillo's seminal 1985 novel – as its final sequence.
We're in the supermarket – that most American of places – and amidst its gaudy displays of cereal boxes and laundry detergent, shoppers have broken out in a choreographed dance, whizzing down the aisles and jiving towards the check-out.
Crackling over the speakers is LCD Soundsystem's anachronistic new single for the film: New Body Rhumba, all crunchy guitars and cowbell. "Super! Super! Super!" a voice extols in the background. It could be the world's most deranged ad jingle.
Among the throng are our hapless ensemble of characters, who, for the past two-and-a-bit hours, have been pummelled by life's misfortunes: addiction, existential anxieties, an apocalyptic disaster. And yet here they are, grinning their way through a consumerist fantasy, all of their woes relegated to history.
That idea – of shopping as a means to ward off doom – might seem outdated. (Some would call it retail therapy.) But there's something infectious about the delirious glee with which Baumbach pleads his case – in one of the only scenes that extends DeLillo's book into truly exciting terrain.
It casts a long shadow over the rest of the film.
For the majority of its run time, Baumbach's work hews too closely to its source material. The result is a film that feels both stuffy and overstuffed, lending credence to the long-held belief in White Noise's unadaptability.
That argument is obvious: DeLillo's book, his eighth novel, is brilliantly slippery; too abstract, too thorny, too cynical, perhaps, for Hollywood.
The more you squint at it, the blurrier it gets; it is entirely scattershot in its evisceration of its decade. Its targets are varied and plentiful: conspiracy theorists, Big Pharma, American exceptionalism, ecological crisis – to name just a handful.
The prose is dense and affectless; information overload is the point, mirroring what DeLillo understood as the deluge of content flooding the public consciousness. Television, he writes, possesses a "narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power" – his tongue-in-cheek tone belying a deep-seated paranoia of modern media.
All of this sets an ominous stage for Baumbach's film – produced through Netflix, arguably the current manifestation of DeLillo's nightmares.
The streaming monolith is no stranger to funding the white whales of acclaimed directors, often to indulgent ends: See David Fincher's odyssey to realise his father's screenplay (Mank), or Alejandro G. Iñarritu's congested chronicle of his own career (Bardo).
Baumbach, as the origin story goes, read White Noise as a teenager and revisited it just before the pandemic. It's not a stretch to imagine the blank cheque he could've been handed after his last Netflix joint – the Oscar-winning Marriage Story (2019).
To his credit, he films the supposedly unfilmable with great gusto – which, at least initially, sustains a winning union between author and adaptor.
All of Baumbach's characters are, in some way, riddled with neuroses – Frances Ha's maddeningly destructive heroine and Greenberg's bolshie layabout just two stand-outs in a filmography brimming with people on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
White Noise is no different: Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a professor of "Hitler studies" at the fictional College-on-the-Hill, which means he spends most of his classes screening films and saying fatuous things about the state of the nation.
Both him and his spacey, pill-popping wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) are pumped full of dread. In bed, they have tortuous conversations about mortality; imagining each other's deaths is their form of pillow talk.
Their children, naturally, are precocious, not so much the Brady Bunch as the Bookish Bunch. There's Denise (Raffey Cassidy's first major role since her breakout in Vox Lux), who's caught onto her mother's pharmaceutical predilections; the gifted and talentless Heinrich (Sam Nivola) who reads data for sport and needles everyone around him with brainiac queries; the younger Steffie (May Nivola), and baby Wilder (a role shared by Dean and Henry Moore).
Together, they are the picture of middle-class ennui.
Driver and Gerwig are game enough to don normal people cosplay: His hair is rapidly thinning and hers is a shock of frizzy curls – "important hair", as it's called by Murray (Don Cheadle), one of Jack's twitchy colleagues.
Baumbach interprets the novel's title as an instruction, dialling up the drone of everyday life to an almost unbearable din. Chatter leaks through doors left ajar; the radio is on at all times, its staticky transmission seeping through the walls.
For a while, it hums along like this: a quintessential Baumbach film where nothing much happens but everybody is stressed.
But DeLillo's book is restless, shifting violently between genres. No sooner have we acclimated to its offbeat domesticity than it lurches into dystopian sci-fi – then thriller, pulpy noir, and political manifesto.
Baumbach rides these waves beat for beat. With a few manic cuts, he crash-lands us into Spielbergian territory: A vehicle collision has unleashed a gargantuan plume of chemical waste, and it's inching its way across the sky towards the Gladneys' humble abode.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's an Airborne Toxic Event – or at least that's what everyone's calling it, and suddenly all the townspeople are evacuating in long traffic jams, inching towards some far-flung refugee camp to escape the noxious gas.
There is certainly spectacle to be found here – not dissimilar to the skybound menace of Jordan Peele's recent Nope – thanks to some surprisingly artful CGI that renders the poisonous cloud putrid and majestic in equal measure.
And there are brief, farcical interjections from a menagerie of nutters: clueless camp volunteers, folksy hippies who strum a gentle paean to UFOs, and a conspiracy theorist armed with an anti-media screed.
But as the pace picks up, Jack and Babette – in Baumbach's version – remain strangely limp, their deadpan anxieties chafing against the ecological apocalypse of their surroundings.
It works to uncanny effect in the novel, heightening the fear of social atomisation that pervades DeLillo's prose. His characters are blinkered by their own fixations, despite the unfolding catastrophe.
On screen, however, the same fixations read as cold, as if Jack and Babette were merely ventriloquising DeLillo's own discourses.
They speak with identical registers, both tending towards the academic. The style proves unsustainable, especially as White Noise hurtles towards its bloated final act – which culminates in the talkiest shootout ever captured in film.
With all his meticulous attention, Baumbach has crafted less a loving homage than a rote duplication of DeLillo's text.
Family, Babette says early into the film, is "the noise and the heat of being". One wishes Baumbach had focused less on the noise and more on the heat.
White Noise is in cinemas now and streams on Netflix from December 30.
