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These thoughts were going through my mind while watching “White Noise,” another film where the dead manage to contact the living but no one is able to properly appreciate this miracle because what they have said is so damn inscrutable. Of course, if they did that, the plot would be over in about fifteen minutes and there would be nowhere else to go. On the other hand, since the plot itself is the least interesting aspect of the film, this might not have been a bad idea; once again, this is one of those movies that presents a potentially intriguing idea and somehow contrives to dumb it down so that it can still involve chase scenes, races against the clocks and serial killers.

Michael Keaton stars as Jonathan Rivers and when we first see him, he is going through one of those movie mornings that is so normal and mundane that we begin mentally counting off the minutes until his world is turned upside-down forever. Right on schedule, his author wife Anna (Chandra West) disappears and, after several weeks, she turns up dead. (She must be an especially famous author since her disappearance seemingly merits around-the-clock news coverage.) A few months later, bereaved Jonathan is stopped by a strange man (Ian McNeice) who asks him if he wants to communicate with his dead wife. It seems that he is a student of Electronic Voice Phenomenon, a process through which the dead supposedly are able to contact the living via the static generated by televisions, radios and the like. At first, Jonathan is skeptical but after about six seconds, he begins hearing messages that are so clear and distinct that there can be no doubt that they really are coming from beyond the grave.

In other words, “White Noise” is one of those movies that takes a crackpot theory and presents it as a gospel truth that everyone on screen believes in wholeheartedly-the only difference between something like this and the old Sunn Classics exploitation films like “Beyond and Back” and “Hanger 18 is that “White Noise” does it with a higher-caliber budget and cast. The problem with this approach is that it is so eager to make us believe that EVP actually exists that it sacrifices a lot of potential dramatic tension. Wouldn’t it have been more effective if Jonathan isn’t completely convinced right off the bat and that there was just a hint that he was so desperate to once again hear from his wife that he might be forcing himself to “hear” her in the static? Regardless, these early scenes don’t hurt too much, mostly because of the welcome return to the screen of the too-long-gone Michael Keaton, whose effective low-key performance almost manages to sell much of this nonsense.

The problem with “White Noise” is that the filmmakers apparently think that the notion of being able to communicate with the dead just isn’t compelling enough on its own. Instead, they turn Jonathan’s wife into some kind of cryptic police scanner from beyond the grave who gives her husband incredibly vague clues to things that are about to happen so that he can eventually decode them and arrive in the ta-daa nick of time to prevent babies from being crushed and the like. If that isn’t enough (and it certainly should have been), they even throw in a serial killer hunting down EVP followers for no readily apparent reason. This particular development is especially unsatisfying-not just because it makes no sense (I defy anyone to fully explain the ending to me) but it is done so arbitrarily that when the killer is finally unmasked, it is a person who has appeared so infrequently that the film is actually forced to supply a flashback to the character’s one previous bit appearance just to remind viewers that the person actually had previously appeared.

Despite the nice Keaton performance, “White Noise”is the kind of early-January dippiness that is seen by people starved for any new film and then quickly forgotten and the self-serious tone of the proceedings never quite disguises the fact that this is little more than an expensive (and less satisfying) version of the MST3K classic “The Dead Talk Back.” For a film like this to work, it should be realistic enough to be plausible and yet convincing enough to make even the most skeptical viewers consider the possibilities that EVP actually exists. By the end, however, I think all will be agreeing that the characters would have been a lot happier in the long run if they had switched to digital cable and satellite radio.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11420&reviewer=389
originally posted: 01/07/05 16:13:19
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