136 min | R | November 25, 2022 | Netflix
A professor of Hitler Studies has spent his life lecturing about death to avoid feeling it. Then a toxic cloud drifts over his town and the abstraction becomes a body count. The terror was always there. The chemicals just made it visible.
Jack Gladney is a professor of Hitler Studies at a small college in the 1980s. He has built a career on a man whose language he cannot speak. His family eats and shops and talks over each other in a suburban house that hums with low-grade dread. Then a train derails, a toxic chemical cloud rises, and the airborne event makes the abstract fear of death suddenly physical. Noah Baumbach’s film is about the things people build to keep from thinking about dying, and the way those things collapse the moment death stops being theoretical.
Adam Driver plays Jack as a man performing competence he does not feel. He delivers academic monologues with total authority and then stands paralyzed when his car will not start during the evacuation. Greta Gerwig plays Babette with a brittle cheer that hides a secret pharmaceutical dependency. She is medicating the same terror her husband lectures about. Don Cheadle plays Murray Siskind, a colleague who wants to do for Elvis what Jack did for Hitler, and his deadpan theorizing turns the film’s ideas into stand-up. Raffey Cassidy and Sam Nivola play the older children as the only people who treat the chemical disaster as the emergency it is.
Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo’s novel and refuses to smooth out its tonal extremes. The film lurches from screwball domestic comedy to disaster spectacle to noir without warning, and that whiplash is deliberate. Lol Crawley’s cinematography saturates the supermarket aisles into a glowing cathedral of consumer color, and the store becomes the film’s true church. Danny Elfman’s score pushes the suburban scenes toward a synthetic unease that never resolves. The closing sequence stages an entire dance number through the checkout lanes, set to LCD Soundsystem, and turns shopping into the last available ritual.
The film swings at enormous targets. It wants to be a comedy of academia, a disaster movie, a marriage drama, and a treatise on American death anxiety at once. The pieces are individually sharp and they never fully lock together. Baumbach captures DeLillo’s voice and the specific texture of dread underneath consumer abundance, but the ambition outruns the structure. This is a brilliant collection of scenes in search of the movie that would hold them.