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George Clooney as Jay Kelly, a film peppered with brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths.Peter Mountain/Netflix/Netflix
Jay Kelly
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Written by Noah Baumbach and Emily Mortimer
Starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler and Laura Dern
Classification N/A; 132 minutes
Streaming on Netflix starting Dec. 5
It is hard to hate George Clooney, a (mostly) universal truth that Noah Baumbach comes to realize all too late into Jay Kelly, his new tragicomedy about the loves and losses of magnificently compelling jerks.
Not that the filmmaker hasn’t struggled with this balance of the sweet and sour as of late, with the wonderfully insufferable antiheroes of The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg having gradually morphed into the cuddly curmudgeons of The Meyerowitz Stories and Marriage Story. (Wall-punching memes be damned, there is a softness to Adam Driver’s character in the latter film that simply would not have passed the Baumbach smell test back in his earlier days.)
And so Hollywood’s one-time favourite cynic continues his slide toward twinkly-eyed sympathy with Jay Kelly, which aims to be another entry in Baumbach’s hall of very bad dads but cannot help, like many (liberal) moviegoers, to submit defeat to Clooney’s charm offensive.
The most disappointing part is that the film is peppered with so many brief moments of comic flair and clear-eyed truths that they are collectively almost enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter what Baumbach’s intentions might’ve been. Unfortunately, those sharper-edged bits and pieces eventually become subsumed by a drippy sentimentality that sticks to you like the crisp white suit that Clooney is often wrapped inside of.
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As the title character, Clooney is essentially playing a “but for the grace of God” version of himself: a mega-successful movie star who senses that his career might be on the wane, the big-screen industry in which he made his name increasingly feeling smaller. (Insert your own joke here about how this marks Clooney’s second straight-to-streaming title in a row.)
But whereas the real-deal Clooney has a (seemingly) happy family life, Jay has cycled through several disastrous marriages and is all but estranged from his eldest daughter Jessica (Riley Keough), who has taken to communicating with him through a surfer-boy shrink. And so, in a belated bid to avoid the same fate with his younger child Daisy (Grace Edwards), Jay pushes the start date of his latest production and joins his college-bound kid on a summer jaunt across Europe.
Baumbach isn’t so much interested in a father-daughter road-trip comedy, though, as he is a character study meets industry satire. Although Jay crosses paths with Daisy here and there, the man is mostly in the company of his long-time manager Ron (Adam Sandler, wonderfully harried) and a coterie of beleaguered staff and contemporaries, including a publicist trying to put out various bad-headline fires (Laura Dern), a hairstylist who is more interested in securing some side gigs with European politicians (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the film with Baumbach), and Ben (Patrick Wilson), a devoted family-man actor whose industry profile is on the exact opposite trajectory as Jay’s.
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Director Noah Baumbach uneasily tries to balance semi-witty set pieces as Jay makes his way through France and then Italy.Peter Mountain/The Associated Press
As Jay makes his way through France and then Italy, Baumbach uneasily tries to balance semi-witty set pieces (Jay charming a train full of tourists, Jay stopping a mugger, Jay regretting his long-ago decision to express a fondness for cheesecake) with slow-burn flashbacks that struggle to add murky depths to the character’s squeaky-clean image.
The film almost hits the mark during an extended sequence in which Jay faces off against his acting-school buddy Timothy (Billy Crudup), who blames Jay for stealing both a pivotal role and his girlfriend. Yet as great as both performers are in that moment – especially Crudup, who somehow makes the concept of “Method” acting interesting again – Baumbach struggles to make Jay feel anything more than the magazine-cover image of Clooney that so many of us already hold dear.
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The character of Jay Kelly is all but estranged from his eldest daughter Jessica, played by Riley Keough.Peter Mountain/The Associated Press
Baumbach seems to accept the reality of this roadblock by the film’s finale, in which Jay watches a highlights reel of his work, all the films pulled from Clooney’s actual career (with a curiously hefty amount of footage from 1997’s The Peacemaker).
As Baumbach watches his star watching himself, the thin line between Clooney and Kelly all but evaporating, the movie transforms into a delicious swirl of emotions and memories, nostalgia and personas. But before moviegoers can process it, or before Baumbach comes to appreciate just the moment that he reverse-engineered, it’s over, roll credits. There’s no second take in life, is Jay Kelly’s message. But there could have been a second draft.
