Up to this point, writer/director Noah Baumbach has operated in the chattier sectors of American indie cinema. We’ve look at three of his films on this blog already, and they have all involved intimate and unvarnished looks at families with a shared interest (or even disinterest) in the arts. And despite a couple disagreements here and there in the film craft or the framing of their central ideas, I’ve come to look forward to seeing new films from the guy. So you can imagine my surprise when his new film is a major switch-up from his usual wheelhouse.
Rather than the interior framing and dramatic stakes, this film involves an ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, with a collision involving a derailed train giving way to a giant red-and-purple cloud that looks like it escaped a Spielberg movie. Indeed, the visuals and the examination of the dark side of spectacle shares a few key similarities with Jordan Peele’s latest (a more cynical reviewer might even call this ‘The Great White Nope’), and they reach similar conclusions about our collective attraction to this kind of catastrophe exhibition.
This film opens with Don Cheadle’s Prof. Siskind giving a lecture on the history of car crashes in American movies and the sensation of excitement and even joy they can create in their audience. From there, we get further examples of us finding happiness in tragedy, which comes to a bizarre head as we get Siskind and Adam Driver’s Jack engaging in what I can only call ‘duelling monologues’, with Siskind talking about Elvis Presley, and Jack… talking about Adolf Hitler.
I should mention at this point that it is frankly ridiculous just how overwritten this dialogue is. I can appreciate that this is based on a novel from the mid-80s (and one with a reputation for being difficult to adapt, apparently), but that doesn’t make what I kept hearing sound any less unnatural. Huge concrete blocks of text delivered and frequently overlapping with each other, bouts of sudden and open narration from Jack that were especially weird after seeing this exact thing get made fun of in Lightyear, and just a general air of… with how much I waffle on, this might sound hypocritical, but this is quite pretentious across the board.
It doesn’t help that, while the first two-thirds lean into the Spielbergian approach to spectacle (and do decently with it, even if the ‘this was made for Netflix’ sense of scale holds it back a bit), the last third finds Baumbach trying to revert back to his more close-up character framing, bringing what started out as an intimidating plague event into another spousal dispute between Jack and Greta Gerwig’s Babette. It even gets to a climactic moment set in a dingy motel that gave me early Michael Mann flashbacks, which only adds to the soupy nature of the plot structure here.
Of course, while it’s a definite change-up inside of what is already a major change-up for the director, there is a reason for it being set up like this. Across the three parts, we see the before, during, and after of a catastrophe in the middle of the spectacle in the Airborne Toxic Event, and through that, the film (from what I can gleam) has a lot to do with the fear and anticipation of death. The way media uses spectacle to try and create distance between us and that inevitability by making it someone else’s problem to deal with, how 80s-era consumerism serves a similar distraction, ditto the pharmaceutical industry, etc.
And what it ultimately gets at is how death is inevitable and finding some oddball sense of optimism about it, taking on this holistic form of the placebo effect in the idea that, if we think something is going to help us deal with that knowledge, then it will. Since that intersects with the aforementioned consumerism, which leads to the end credits dance number (which, in the film’s defence, might be the best credits sequence of any film I’ve seen in 2022), I’m not 100% as to how seriously I’m supposed to be taking this idea… but I can at least understand the mentality behind it.
With how intentionally-absurdist a lot of the tone is here, along with how sprawling it can be in its grab-bag approach to thematic ideas and plot points, this is definitely the most difficult of Noah Baumbach’s filmography that I’ve seen to date, both in the watching of it and in the attempts to recommend it. Its positives are largely in spite of the things around them, such as the performances managing to deliver catharsis despite the literary dialogue, or the handling of theme compared to just how many different themes are being handled, or blockbuster-tier visuals sandwiched between Baumbach’s usual small-scale framing.
But even with that said, there’s something about this film’s overall perspective on mortality that I kinda like. No matter what choices we make regarding lifestyle, diet, relationships, or anything else, all roads inevitably lead to the same destination. That idea is one shown throughout this film, and in the midst of so much overexplanation, I appreciate how (relatively) subtle it is as a throughline. Because of that, and the ultimate message about finding whatever way makes sense for you to deal with death’s facticity, I still find some genuine merit in this. It’s just that it’s packaged with what I would easily consider Noah Baumbach’s most difficult film I’ve seen yet.
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