June 7, 2022, 9:05am
I’m not particularly superstitious but there are some very bad vibes coming off Noah Baumbach’s Netflix adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
While the headline is how much the thing is allegedly costing—$140 million for a lot of recursive academic dialogue between Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig? Not even a CGI airborne toxic event? Is the money going to Driver’s crash-diet?—there appears to be a darker side to the production, as three crew members have died over the course of filming (a heart attack, an overdose, and by suicide). This is really just tragic bad luck, of course, but from the sound of it Baumbach has been pushing his cast and crew well beyond the breaking point.
The legendarily “unfilmable” White Noise should be an ideal project for Baumbach, who’s made a career depicting putatively smart, self-regarding men with impressive vocabularies. And even though the production seems to have disaster written all over it, I will still probably go see it in theaters on my couch, at the very least just to figure out where all the money went…