Noah Baumbach loves to find sympathy in unsympathetic subjects—the awkward title character of Greenberg, the caustic writer played by Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding, the bitter divorced couple of Marriage Story. But he’s usually done it by mixing in plenty of bitter with just a touch of sweet. For his new movie, Jay Kelly, that formula is reversed in service of another character who might struggle to earn the viewer’s pity: a bored, aging movie star worried that he’s lived life the wrong way. It’s hard to know why anyone should feel a pang of understanding for Jay Kelly (played by George Clooney), but Baumbach relishes the challenge.
Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s fourth movie in a row that will be released to Netflix, with a short theatrical release. In his collaboration with the streaming studio, his scope has widened far beyond the small-scale indie dramedies that began his career—acerbic triumphs such as Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale, and Mr. Jealousy. His last work was a fascinating, flawed, staggeringly ambitious adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise; with Jay Kelly, he’s charting a gentler, more familiar path, in terms of plot and setting.
Another director might have had a hard time getting audiences to care about the prosaic concerns of this beloved millionaire, but Baumbach, in casting Clooney, chose a star who himself has seemed a little lost at sea. After spending years mostly directing his own projects, usually to middling reviews, Clooney has recently turned in a couple of performances that felt like pale facsimiles of former glories, in the rom-com Ticket to Paradise and the action-thriller Wolfs. Both whiffs only further reminded me what a top-tier star Clooney used to be, and these staid recent efforts help meta-textually burnish Jay Kelly’s initial setup. The film is about an actor, still well known and ostensibly successful, who feels dissatisfied with his creative choices and disconnected from the people around him. When an old mentor dies, at the funeral Jay runs into Timothy (Billy Crudup), a friend from his early days as an actor. Their reminiscing quickly turns sour, sending Jay into an emotional tailspin, and he impulsively flies to Italy rather than make his next movie.
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I won’t even bother to play the world’s tiniest violin for Jay; after all, who among us hasn’t wanted to jaunt to Tuscany rather than face their contractual obligations? And Jay gets to have a particularly luxe midlife crisis, fueled by the resources of a rich movie star. But Baumbach smartly renders the character’s breakdown as more farcical than tragic. As Jay jets away from Hollywood, an ecosystem of assistants and managers fires into action. His bedraggled manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), arranges for a lifetime-achievement award to await him in Europe; his publicist Liz (Laura Dern) runs interference on the viral videos that start to leak out of a hapless Jay stumbling around train cars, looking confused in the unfamiliar environment.
The gag of Baumbach’s screenplay, co-written with the actor and writer Emily Mortimer, is perfectly pitched. Jay is feeling melancholy about the prosaic direction of his career, and the fact that his younger daughter went abroad with her school friends rather than hang out with him in Hollywood. But externally, what manifests is a lot of stumbling, silly comedy, as Jay hilariously fails to navigate regular life. If he walks through a town anywhere in the world, people notice him and swarm, like he’s some Armani-clad messiah. Clooney nails the character’s mix of embarrassment and joy at these interactions, while the team around him hurriedly tries to maintain his malfunctioning reality-distortion field.
The closest comparison to Jay Kelly I could think of is the more anarchic films of Federico Fellini, such as La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, where the Italian director started to wrestle with his own success. Jay Kelly isn’t nearly as good as those, but it’s interesting to see Baumbach take this sillier approach (down to the Tuscan setting) for a showbiz satire. Yes, some of the side characters have an acidic touch, particularly the wonderfully aggrieved Ron, who has chosen to ignore his family to tend to Jay’s nervous breakdown. But Baumbach never lets the material get particularly heavy, perhaps aware that the audience won’t buy that someone as famous as Jay could really experience suffering.
Instead, it all builds to the biggest circus of all: an international film festival designed to celebrate a man who isn’t sure if he’s accomplished anything meaningful besides starring in a bunch of blockbusters. The final notes of Jay Kelly are played for pure sympathy, and it’s Baumbach’s biggest storytelling gamble. Can his viewer tolerate one big gulp of pure sentimentality after two-plus hours that have largely skirted that tone? For me, yes—Clooney’s a strong-enough star to sell Jay’s achy heart, even amid the glitz and glamour. Baumbach’s odyssey into more treacly territory is an attention-worthy gambit, though one hopes he doesn’t lock the grouchiness away forever.
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