Release Date: January 7, 2005
Starring: Michael Keaton, Deborah Kara Unger, Chandra West, Ian McNeice
Directed by: Geoffrey Sax
Written by: Niall Johnson
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, disturbing images, language)
Most filmmakers are middle-aged men and women who work in an industry that puts a premium on extraordinary, unbelievable fantasies, which might explain why the midlife crisis has ramified well beyond its familiar boundaries and into almost every genre available. Take, for example, White Noise, a scary, empty thriller directed by Geoffrey Sax from a script by Niall Johnson, in which Michael Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers, a middle-aged, upper-middle-class architect, divorced and remarried, who goes on a wild adventure of paranormal proportions after he hears his dead wife’s voice in tape recordings made several months after her death. The story soon has him running to and from deserted locations in the small hours of the night, contacting the dead and seeking out the help of elusive experts on the subject, known as electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, to determine the exact message his wife wants to give him from beyond the grave. This doesn’t come without some trouble, of course, and as such this would normally be the province of younger men. But not in Hollywood. Just as the real-life middle-aged men of Tinseltown (and elsewhere) buy convertible BMW roadsters to recapture some element of their lost youth, so now can they also engage in the breathless, hair-raising mysteries and suspense of the supernatural to convince themselves they are still every bit the equals of the generation of actors approaching from the younger side of 30.
That this is true should be fairly obvious, because White Noise, which is supposed to be about electronic voice phenomena -- it includes a quote from Thomas Edison and a dictionary definition of EVP as a preface -- takes EVP mostly for granted, even though most viewers will probably be somewhat unfamiliar with it, if not openly skeptical. And not without good reason. Despite the work of such organizations as the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena, which was founded in 1982, there exists scant evidence in support of the idea that the dead may be communicating with us through swatches of white noise captured on tapes or CDs. Nevertheless, when the first-act death of Jonathan’s second wife, Anna (Chandra West), leaves him stunned and alone, Jonathan, with the help of an expert named Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) and one of Raymond’s clients, a widow named Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), hesitates only briefly before establishing a formidable EVP operation in his house: VCRs, TVs, computers, all tuned to frequencies between stations to capture and record white noise, and the transmissions from beyond the grave that may accompany it.
Keaton is the ideal lead for a film like this, because he is the dorky epitome of middle-aged Hollywood: With that large, almost oversized forehead, which slopes down into a chin so ill-defined as to be nonexistent, he has none of the chiseled, former matinee-idol perfection that other middle-aged actors, like George Clooney or Laurence Fishburne, seem to have in abundance. And sure enough: Not only must Keaton act as a temporary front man for EVP, a pastime of mortifying dorkiness (the AAEVP’s website advises visitors that their inquiries via email may not be answered due to a White Noise-related popularity spike), he is also called upon to spend most of the film -- at least, the parts where he is not running around in the movie’s somewhat contrived chase scenes -- craning toward televisions and computer monitors, pressing that oversized, lopsided head close to the screen in search of the supernatural messages he quickly becomes obsessed with.
As with The Ring, the scares in White Noise come mostly from the TVs that Jonathan looks at, as the nothingness of white noise suddenly and randomly transforms into vague images, first of his dead wife and then of figures far more terrifying. One neat effect that Sax employs in his film is the appearance of three ghostlike figures standing shoulder to shoulder before every bad or scary thing happens in the film -- as one EVP expert tells Jonathan, and as he hears himself in several recordings, not everybody in the afterlife is benign. But as countless other directors have shown in countless other supernatural thrillers, it’s not very difficult -- effortless, even -- to make a movie that will get viewers to clutch their armrests or each other out of apprehension and then jump when the scare scenes reach their startling climaxes. White Noise is thick with middle-age fantasy but woefully thin on plot, which is why its scares are so empty. It has hijacked EVP in order to give a rather average ghost story a bit of spooky, pseudo-scientific basis: This could happen to you, the filmmakers want you to think, because unlike that entirely fictional evil spirit in The Ring, these evil spirits have been proven to exist, by technological luminaries as famous as Thomas Edison (who, in the 1920’s, apparently told a reporter from Scientific American that a device could be manufactured to record the voices of the dead).
Well, not quite. That a marginally competent ghost story like this one needs a scientific or technological foundation is only proof of its vintage in an age when fortysomething men have taken over the Internet. It is, in many respects, 1983’s Videodrome updated for the 21st century set: A piece of postmodern fascination with televisions, recording devices, and a fear of cult phenomena, wrapped around a middle-aged man looking to escape his mundane existence. After the unexpected death of a second wife, most men might grieve, and slowly move on, but Jonathan Rivers chooses to spend hours and hours staring at the static on television screens until he finally sees what he wants to see -- and then, perhaps, wishes he hadn’t. Predictably, the movie indulges him. When someone’s grief turns into a sadistically colossal and twisted midlife crisis like this, the most routine thing for Hollywood to do is cook up a mildly exciting thriller about it for us to watch.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)