Criticism of ‘Background noise’, the dysfunctional Gladney family

Criticism of ‘Background noise’, the dysfunctional Gladney family

Noah Baumbach has adapted Don DeLillo’s masterpiece with an all-star cast that includes Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and Jodie Turner-Smith.

    Noah Baumbach has adapted Don DeLillo’s masterpiece as if nostalgic for its prophetic dimension. It may sound contradictory, but his film, impregnated with an eighties aesthetic that projects its paranoia towards the contemporary, seems to tell us that the future has already passed.. The Gladney family is dysfunctional enough to occupy pride of place in a filmography that has always shown an interest in eccentric households, but ‘Background Noise’ widens the battlefield with a sort of omnibus film that is many things at once. time, from a Martian sitcom to a dystopian fable, from a shrewd parody of the theater of the absurd of the academic world to a profound meditation on our fear of death.

    ‘Background noise’ does not always live up to its ambitions, especially when it faces the ‘new normal’ of its protagonists after suffering the effects of a toxic cloud. In this final section, it is difficult for him to adjust the abrupt changes in tone of the story, but it closes with a memorable musical scene, with a supermarket as a luminous purgatory of our desire for happiness.

    For lovers of fulfilled prophecies

    The best: the episode of the toxic cloud and its evident pandemic resonances.

    The worst: in the final third it is difficult for him to fine-tune his tone.

    DATA SHEET

    Address: Noah Baumbach Distribution: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Jodie Turner-Smith, Don Cheadle Country: USA Year: 2022 Release date: 9–12-2022 Gender: comedy, horror Script: Noah Baumbach Duration: 136 min.

    Synopsis: An industrial accident causes a terrible environmental incident in a bucolic city in the American Midwest, covering it in a toxic cloud. Jack, a university professor who has lived surrounded by the white noise of high technology, electromagnetic signals and consumerism, is forced to face his own mortality.

    Source: Fotogramas

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