Who knows what Baumbach will do with all this. But I’m afraid he’s going to turn it into something impossibly twee, or even (avert your eyes) sentimental. What you really need for White Noise is a director with a dry wit, a surrealist sensibility, and a black heart. In my opinion, Baumbach is too interested in emotions to adapt Don DeLillo. DeLillo is an ideas guy. It’s like Wes Anderson adapting Infinite Jest.
From Emily Temple at LitHub.
I happen to be reading White Noise for the first time right now, and when I first saw the news, for whatever reason I read it as Noah Hawley (Legion, TV’s Fargo), and as a result thought that that made a lot of sense for the above reasons. Baumbach makes sense only insofar as that it’s a very kind of hipster novel, but based on the actual material of the novel, Noah Hawley seems like he’d be a much better fit. I’m not going to say I was necessarily excited about it either way, and I have no particular qualms with Baumbach (like Temple, I enjoyed The Squid and the Whale, and used to use it in class; I haven’t seen much of his other work, though). But, I’d be really interested to see how Hawley would handle that material, and frankly, I suspect it would be a more interesting adaptation than what we’ll likely get from Baumbach.
