Review: Jay Kelly — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Jay Kelly

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes

Stars: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern

Writers: Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer

Director: Noah Baumbach

In theaters and on Netflix

 

Movie stars, George Clooney’s new movie tells us, suffer from the same anxieties you do. They, too, struggle to balance work and family. They fret about being replaced by young newcomers. They are emotionally dinged by their parents’ failures, and fear they may be making the same mistakes with their own kids.

Of course, movie stars also get to contemplate those matters while jumping onto their private jets for weekends in Italy, or sitting by their pool in a yard with a view all the way to Catalina Island, or having the smallest details of their day-to-day life tended to by a groveling personal staff.

Movie stars, it turns out, are like the rest of us mostly in the bad ways. And that makes painting a sympathetic, relatable portrait of one a naggingly tough sell.

If anyone could make the formula work it would be Clooney, an actor congenitally charming and disarmingly accessible. Firing up those basset-hound eyes and that megawatt smile, Clooney effortlessly evokes sympathy for actor Jay Kelly, a guy who is at once shielded from the humdrum flow of everyday responsibilities while also somehow drowning in it. It is no small ask for us to become emotionally invested in a guy who goes running through a forest in his white linen suit, sobbing because he can’t get anyone in his family to show up for a lifetime achievement award ceremony in Tuscany, but we’ve been living in Clooneyville for nearly 50 years, and we’re not about to give up on him now.

Co-writer-director Noah Baumbach (Barbie, The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story) surrounds Clooney with an appealing superstar cast — including Adam Sandler as Jay Kelly’s endlessly resourceful agent, Laura Dern as Liz, his insanely efficient chief of staff, and Stacy Keach as his vaguely disapproving dad. A bit farther out in his orbit are, unfortunately, his two daughters: grade school teacher Jessica (Mad Max: Fury Road’s Riley Keough), who seems permanently estranged from her father, and college student Daisy (Grace Edwards of Asteroid City), with whom Jay thinks he may still have a chance.

Baumbach, a gifted filmmaker, here makes the awkward choice to have Jay occasionally revisit, Ebenezer Scrooge-like, pivotal moments from his past: the tossed-off audition that launched his career but destroyed a friendship; the on-set love scene that led to the end of his first marriage; a disastrous visit to a psychologist with his older daughter. In a film where the protagonist already dwells on a plane of relative unreality, introducing outright fantasy does not help ground the rest of us in a sense of connection.

Ironically, it is the relatively minor characters here who do manage to engage us: Ron, the agent amiably played by Sandler, is in a sense married to both his boss and his long-suffering wife (Greta Gerwig, Baumbach’s Barbie collaborator). But his work also forces Ron into continued close collaboration with Liz, whom he came this close to marrying 19 years ago. Jay’s old friend Timothy – played with thinly veiled rage by Billy Crudup – still carries a grudge nearly five decades after he and Jay auditioned for the same part. Then there’s Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson), a fellow movie star who seems to have found the sweet spot between family and fame, and cult film director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), who would rather make the movies he wants than the ones that would make money.

It turns out Jay is afloat in a galaxy of people who have gone through their lives making decisions with an eye toward something other than a supernova of fame; he’s the only one who doesn’t see himself drifting into a black hole. Frankly, those other folks are a lot more interesting and certainly more fun.

I’m trying to think of the last film about the trials of being a movie star that really, really worked, and I have to go all the way back to 1950 and Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder’s harrowing portrait of a struggling screenwriter (William Holden) and his dysfunctional relationship with a one-time movie queen (Gloria Swanson). Sunset worked largely because Wilder conceived it as a film noir; Holden’s everyman was a street-smart outsider whose inborn cynicism held the glitter of Hollywood at arm’s length. In contrast, show biz soaps — most notably the various incarnations of A Star Is Born — dwell almost exclusively within the bubble of stardom, focusing on how the fleeting nature of fame can engender personal compromises no clear-eyed person would ever make.

Jay Kelly wraps up at that lifetime achievement salute in Tuscany, with the flesh-and-blood star sitting with an adoring audience watching his celluloid life unspool on screen. It makes perfect sense for Baumbach to employ vintage George Clooney clips for the tribute reel, but the choice further tangles our attitude toward the film.

Clooney has always seemed to play characters that hewed to his unique personality; it’s a trait that’s defined him, for better or for worse, more as a movie star than as an actor (although he is capable of truly inspired work, as in The Descendants). What are we to make of Clooney/Kelly tearing up as he seems to mourn the life he sacrificed in service of producing those Clooney/Kelly clips? In the final shot, when we find those soulful eyes staring straight into ours, are we encountering Clooney or Kelly? Or both?

I don’t mind somber endings. I’m not sure how I feel about a movie trying to make me feel complicit in a character’s lifetime of bad decisions.