With the release of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, the breakthrough novel from one of the most celebrated authors of the last 50 years has finally been brought to the screen. At the heart of Don DeLillo’s darkly humorous 1985 novel is the story of an American family coping with (among other things) an airborne toxic event. While this disaster does force them to evacuate their home, they’re unable to escape the creeping ennui of contemporary life in America — or get beyond the surfaces, screens, and simulated nature of their realities, priorities, or relationships with one another.
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Starring Adam Driver, Great Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, White Noise has divided critics and fans, but the same could be said for the source material (and DeLillo’s entire body of work). In many ways, Baumbach and his cast have accomplished the best effort to date to capture the balancing act that makes DeLillo’s work so essential: informed, thought-provoking cultural commentary wrapped in a shell of dark, absurdist humor.
Undeniably, DeLillo has been at the leading edge of fiction since the 1970s, exerting massive influence on entire generations of artists and writers. So, why haven’t more of his award-winning novels, short stories, or plays been brought to the screen?
Don DeLillo’s Fiction Should Be Perfect for Film Adaptation
Netflix
With a sharp, deadpan wit, DeLillo’s satirical macro-explorations of cultural commentary create sweeping backdrops for his studies on the micro-effects of an individual’s interactions with the ever-increasing velocity and veracity of media, politics, entertainment, academia, and community. DeLillo is an important writer whose “work has illuminated our age without explicitly setting out to do so,” as Josh Zajdman noted in Town & Country. And pop culture has always been a key component to DeLillo’s oeuvre. His characters often obsess over movies and TV — and his themes are drenched in every manner of Americana — while his imagery, dialogue, descriptions and phrasing are all engrained with dry comedy and satire. With all of this in mind, the question remains: Why have only a few of his works been adapted for the screen? To find an answer, a closer examination of the existing film adaptations of his work may help.
Game 6 (2005)
Kindred Media Group
While Game 6 (directed by Michael Hoffman) is not an adaptation of one of his novels, DeLillo actually wrote the screenplay. The story follows successful playwright Nicky Rogan (played by Michael Keaton) around Manhattan on the day his latest production is set to premiere. As Nicky interacts with his semi-estranged daughter, wife, mistress, friends, and a host of others, a pair of stressful specters inject a mounting tension throughout the story. One is a notorious, anonymous play-killing critic (Robert Downey Jr.). The other is Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, set to be played that evening. As a lifelong Red Sox fan, Nicky has been conditioned to expect his team’s collapse, even when victory is assured.
Nicky’s day builds toward these twin tragedies: his play bombing and his team losing. The scenes of Game 6 are loosely strung together like a series of short films, with one main character and a series of reoccurring guest stars. And while the New York Mets’ victory over the Red Sox in the actual Game 6 remains one of the most improbable, fantastic moments in baseball history, when Nicky skips his play’s premiere to watch the game, the Sox defeat sparks him to lash out by finding and killing the phantom critic. Instead of a murder, however, the two men bond over the layers of pain and disappointment in their shared love of the Red Sox — and the critic admits that the play is Nicky’s best work to date.
Aspects of Game 6 sometimes feel like a compilation of DeLillo moments from different works set to film. For instance, NIcky gets stuck in inert traffic while heading crosstown to get a haircut (which is also central to the story of Cosmopolis), and a ruptured asbestos-lined steam pipe in Game 6 creates an airborne toxic event (albeit on a smaller scale than the one in White Noise). However, despite all this — and DeLillo’s direct involvement — while Game 6 delivers a subtle, nuanced story of entangled yet disconnected elements, it never fully captures the humor, absurdity or gravity of DeLillo’s story and dialogue.
Cosmopolis (2012)
Entertainment One
Robert Pattinson delivers a balanced performance in Cosmopolis (directed by David Cronenberg) as Eric Packer, a detached billionaire speculative currency investor whose world is twisted inside out over the course of a day mostly spent in and around his limousine. In some ways, parallels in content, theme, and imagery make Game 6 and Cosmopolis exist almost as a companion pieces to one another. But where Game 6 fails to capture the gravity of DeLillo’s ideas, Cosmopolis is almost crushed under their weight.
Through all the interactions, monologues, and observations, Cosmopolis lacks even a hint of humor. When Packer and his mistress/art dealer Didi Fancher (Juliette Binoche) discuss his desire to buy the Rothko Chapel and have it installed — walls and all — in his Manhattan apartment, there is never an ironic nod to either the absurdity of his desire or the absurdity of art as an industry where transactions exist as proxy for aesthetic consensus on quality.
Further, in the final scene where Packer confronts his would-be assassin (Paul Giamatti), the dialogue finds them sparring and jabbing at each other without ever landing a punch. They seem to just speak at one another about the meanings and motivations behind violence, identity, and fate, with weary, dense statements that carry no energy, tension, or hint of the dark humor DeLillo so subtly threads through his stories.
Cronenberg’s adaptation of Cosmopolis delivers a story with no real beginning and even less resolution. It’s slick and attractive — with gorgeous production design. But watching the film is like witnessing a succession of well-tailored characters deliver obtuse proclamations woven together like a patchwork of ideas that disappear as quickly as they take shape.
Never Ever (2016)
Alfama Films
If the fault of Cosmopolis is that it takes itself too seriously, then perhaps Benoît Jacquot’s adaptation of DeLillo’s novella The Body Artist does not take itself seriously enough. Adapted by Julia Roy (who also stars as Laura in the film), Never Ever (À Jamais) is a slimmer version of the source material, but accomplishes its sparse sleekness by abandoning much of the conflict and deeper exegesis on identity from DeLillo’s story.
Many had high hopes for the film, especially as it starred Mathieu Amalric (Quantum of Solace, The French Dispatch) as the doomed Jacques Rey, who haunts the memories, home and creative process of Laura. Jacquot’s film is beautifully shot, with both Amalric and Roy delivering solid performances. But in the end, Never Ever wants to come off as a “highbrow kind of romantic ghost story with psychological thriller undertones, but falls laughably short of its goals” (via The Hollywood Reporter).
Next in Store for DeLillo on Film
A24
Aside from a few short films that are difficult (at best) to view, these four are the only movies based on the writings of Don DeLillo. And while each has its own merits, only White Noise comes close to depicting the many facets of concept, comedy and commentary inherent in the works of DeLillo.
Whereas Game 6 was unable to deliver the overt gravity of DeLillo’s observations, Cosmopolis was unable to deliver his subtle punchlines. And if anything is clear after looking more closely at all the adaptations of DeLillo’s work, it’s that bringing the nuance which makes DeLillo’s writing so important and enjoyable to film is no easy task. But this doesn’t mean Hollywood is done trying.
According to Deadline, Ted Melfi (Hidden Figures, The Starling) will be the next filmmaker to take a swing at bringing DeLillo’s words to the screen. Melfi has been announced as director of the upcoming Underworld, with Uri Singer producing. Singer also produced White Noise and has optioned The Silence, another DeLillo novel. So while there is no shortage of activity around DeLillo novels, Underworld will present a unique set of challenges due to its sheer scope.
DeLillo’s epic, 1997 National Book Award-winning novel (that many consider his masterpiece) is a long, entangled tapestry of America in the second half of the 20th century, weaving together baseball and the waste management industry along with anonymous highway killings and cold-war nuclear proliferation. In adapting a writer as era-defining as DeLillo to the screen, one has to consider: Would a limited streaming series be a better format than a feature-length film — to allow for the full complexity of ideas to breathe and to give the multiple storylines room to unfold and be told with a more appropriate depth and pace?
