Jay Kelly

An aging white male whose life has turned out empty despite so much fame and success is not a new story, but what counts is in the telling. And that is where I am afraid to report that despite some expressive performances and scenes, Noah Baumbach’s telling of the story of fictional movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) ultimately comes up empty, never demonstrating enough courage in its own convictions, and not quite sure whether it wants to be an easygoing Netflix comedy or something more avant-garde that just happens to be streaming on Netflix. Partly a road trip movie in which Jay journeys from Hollywood to Italy to accept a lifetime achievement award at a Tuscany film festival, it’s clear that Baumbach and his co-writer Emily Mortimer (who also features in a small role) are nodding at Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” though what ensues only occasionally seeks, nevertheless reaches, such metaphysical heights. Despite the fictional movie star’s name essentially being a mirror of the real movie star playing him, “Jay Kelly” remains just outside the looking glass, never bold enough to go all the way through.

“Jay Kelly” begins with a bang by way of a long tracking shot roaming through so much chaos and noise on a movie set before ending with the eponymous character having to go in front of the camera and nail a take. It evokes the actor’s paradox, that despite being surrounded by multitudes, when the camera rolls, the actor is all alone in front of it. It also becomes a metaphor for Jay himself, virtually alone, divorced and with two daughters, one from whom he is estranged and one whom he hardly ever sees, with no real friends other than Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler) who is not really even a friend but his agent. Jay is a ghost in his own life, an idea that Baumbach evokes when Jay re-encounters his old acting school buddy Tim (Billy Crudup) from whom, it turns out, Jay essentially stole the role that turned into his big break. Throughout this sequence, Crudup evinces a mischievous gleam in his eye that you can sense is always half-a-second away from turning to maliciousness, and finally does, their catching up becoming a confrontation. Baumbach seems to play this moment for comedy, but Crudup feels realer, and scarier.

If Crudup steals the movie, then Sandler salvages it. Because this journey to Italy is not just Jay’s, it is Ron’s too, forcing him to come to grips with the fact that he has essentially lived his life on behalf of someone else. And though Jay’s publicist Liz (Laura Dern) decides to walk away from this life, Ron cannot bring himself to, seeing Jay’s career as an extension of his own. It is an affectingly bittersweet character and performance that puts into perspective why actors are always thanking their agents in award speeches whether you like it or not. In a way, the complexities of Ron and his devotion work to explain the emptiness of Jay, but only up to a point. Jay is deliberately written as an empty vessel, a person whose only memories, as he says, come from his own movies, a notion that Baumbach literalizes in flashbacks staged to feel like movie scenes with Jay standing off to the side, as if appraising them. If the emotions these scenes generate can feel pat, they are at least baked in an interesting filmmaking idea, which is more than I can say for how Baumbach treats Jay Kelly as what he nominally is: a movie star. 

Jay never comes across larger than life as intended, illustrated in a scene aboard a European train where he is gawked at and talked to but never in a way that borders on the edge of mania: he feels like, gosh, I don’t know, Charlie Hunnam, not Tom Cruise. What’s worse, Baumbach never infuses a sense of Jay’s work, meaning we never see his onscreen persona contrasted against his real one, to see the gap between the two that ostensibly is supposed to be his emotional fault. All we ever see is a quick highlight reel at the award ceremony and all those highlights are culled from real George Clooney movies. A genial nod to the actor, it might have suggested something more, erasing the lines between actor and character until we realize they are the same, but “Jay Kelly” is not reaching that high and it never seeks to tease out that thin line anywhere else. It is as if by walking up to the edge of actor and character being the same, Baumbach becomes afraid to push it too far, given the unlikable qualities of the character, tying his own hand behind his back, always a little too eager to redeem Jay despite simultaneously suggesting redemption is not so easy. It’s a contradiction he can’t solve, and it causes a closing line that might have landed like a punch to the gut to feel more like a wistful sigh.