Jay Kelly: High-Wattage Cast Unserved by Director Noah Baumbach’s Wobbly Satire
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B-
George Clooney stars, rather fittingly, as a wealthy and wildly charismatic world-famous movie star having a late-in-life existential crisis in Jay Kelly, director Noah Baumbach’s very marquee head-scratcher of a dramedy tightly revolving around Clooney’s title character.
It’s not usually a good sign when it’s unclear why a movie was made or for whom it is intended. In the case of Jay Kelly, Clooney-adjacent players — notably Adam Sandler as Kelly’s obsessively loyal hangdog manager Ron and Laura Dern as his wearying publicist Liz — are leveraging their roles for beefy emotional impact in service of a director noted for extracting exactly that from his casts.
Ultimately, though, it’s hard to summon much sympathy for a protagonist portrayed as having everything except empathy for the army of aides buoying his success from behind the scenes by vigilantly removing obstacles from his path as he ascends ever higher until one day realizing he may be terminally estranged from his daughters. And yet he is still too enmeshed in his grand movie-star orbit to properly make amends.
You can relate, right?
The film opens (sigh) with a Sylvia Plath quote about the rigors of being oneself. That segues into an extended scene on a typically manic movie set, where Kelly is wrapping his latest. As the director yells his final “Cut,” Kelly takes actual centre stage, absorbing fawning congratulations from the myriad hard-working but nameless stiffs on-set, a clear metaphor for the inequality defining Kelly’s life and career.
Shortly thereafter, a plan to spend downtime with daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) is derailed when she informs Jay that she is heading to Europe with friends and he is not invited, as she is travelling lean and mean. Kelly’s global high-wattage and invariable extended entourage would seriously cramp her style.
Two subsequent incidences incite… not quite remorse in Kelly but give him rare pause in his otherwise carefree day-to-day dalliances, prompting him to follow Daisy despite her warning him not to.
First, there’s the death of a beloved filmmaker (Jim Broadbent) who gave Kelly his first shot — and who Kelly failed to help years later when the director needed his name attached to a picture to get it made and reverse his financial folly. And then there is an ugly confrontation with a former friend and fellow actor (Billy Crudup) who Kelly bested at a game-changing early audition.
Another older Kelly daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough) has also been burned by her dad’s unwavering focus on advancing his career at all costs. A late-in-the-film scene between Clooney and Keough shows what kind of emotional gravitas Jay Kelly might have had if it was less obsessed with illustrating the selfish antics of a movie star abetted by those on his payroll. To what end this theme is tirelessly explored is unclear, except maybe to exalt Sandler’s formidable dramatic turn against Clooney’s rote one.
Anyway, Kelly and his expansive crew furtively follow Daisy to Europe causing predictable havoc on trains and town squares and eventually landing in Italy where Kelly unravels, sort of, acquiescing to accepting a legacy award, the bestowing of which brings the film its most meta moment as Kelly watches Clooney as Kelly in an on-screen cinematic retrospective.
Jay Kelly sends Clooney flashbacking multiple times, and it’s here we begin to decode the choices he made to reach the pinnacle. But Jay’s longstanding relationship with his long-suffering manager Ron is the film’s pulse, and as Ron continues chipping away at his own stability with his wife (Greta Gerwig) and children to facilitate Jay’s increasingly third-rail whims, it’s hard not to think that Baumbach is having us on.
Not funny enough to be a biting satire on the absurdity of Hollywood or absorbing enough to be a portrait of regrettable spiritual emptiness, Jay Kelly feels oddly flabby.
That’s especially true coming from someone like Baumbach — capable of such power in Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale — who co-wrote the script with British actor Emily Mortimer, who plays Kelly’s flighty hair-and-makeup artist.
If it’s a case of art imitating life, it’s hard to imagine who other than George Clooney would be in on the joke.
As a sidebar, Dern is having a moment just now, excelling both here and in director Bradley Cooper’s lighthearted break-up comedy-drama Is This Thing On? opposite Will Arnett, which opens December 19. Go girl.
Jay Kelly. Directed by Noah Baumbach, written by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer. Starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Jim Broadbent, Billy Crudup, and Riley Keough. In select theatres now and streaming on Netflix December 5.