The 60th edition of the New York Film Festival officially kicked off on Friday evening with our Opening Night selection: the North American premiere of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, presented by Campari.
In one of the year’s most gratifyingly ambitious American films, Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) has adapted Don DeLillo’s epochal postmodern 1985 novel White Noise, long perceived as unfilmable, into a richly layered, entirely unexpected work of contemporary satire. Adam Driver heartily embodies Jack Gladney, an ostentatious “Hitler Studies” professor and father-of-four whose comfortable suburban college town life and marriage to the secretive Babette (Greta Gerwig, perfectly donning a blonde mop of “important hair”) are upended after a horrifying nearby accident creates an airborne toxic event of frightening and unknowable proportions. In a tightrope walk of comedy and horror, Baumbach captures the essence of DeLillo’s cacophonous pop-philosophical nightmare on unbounded consumerism, ecological catastrophe, and the American obsession with death. Impeccably matching DeLillo’s and Baumbach’s similarly percussive form of stylized dialogue, White Noise is wonderfully abrasive and awe-inspiring, a precisely mounted period piece entirely befitting our modern, through-the-looking-glass pandemic reality.
Above, be sure to scroll through our photo gallery featuring photos from our Opening Night screenings, press conference, red carpet, and afterparty, and check out a video from our red carpet below!
Featuring sold-out screenings in Alice Tully Hall, the Walter Reade Theater, and our Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, White Noise was greeted with a momentously positive reception from our audiences, and the festival will continue through October 16. See all available tickets at NYFF60 and we’ll see you soon!
