A big star for the majority of their adult life, Jay Kelly Has so thoroughly lowered into his classic screen – smirking, debonair, heroic – that he no longer seems to know who he is off. More troublesome, the world famous actor has come to like it that way. As Sylvia Plath once wrote: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be someone else or none at all.”
That quote acts as an almost oppressive fitting epigrap for the foggy eyes Netflix movie that Noah Baumbach has made about one of the last true Hollywood stars-or two of them I would say, as Jay Kelly is so transparent a stand-in for the actor who plays him that he and George Clooney Share the same work. (No complaint here: “Funny people“Is one of my favorite genres). Plath’s words help to frame” Jay Kelly “as the story of a dashed sex ageer who is known by all and no one to the same extent, but Baumbach’s uncharacteristically valuable script, co -written with you Emily Mortimer, has some trouble formulating the dilemma on her own terms.
A captivating line like chlorine on the same idea: “All my memories are movies.” Jay delivers it towards the beginning of filmAs soon as he has wrapped production on a new crime picture – “8 men from now”, which ends with the actor dying for the seventeenth time – so that he can just as well read from a script. There is an immediate noticeable turn of regrets in Clooney’s voice, such as the type of sliding pain that cannot mean anything serious as long as you choose to ignore it, but the real wound in the double leaf dialogue will not be felt until much later.
The problem for Jay is not that his films are memories and that he has gone from one to another so long that he has forgotten how to act without the cameras rolling; that is a Problems, but also one who has always managed to solve himself. No, the problem for Jay is that his Memories are movies: They are frozen in time, shared by everyone who has seen them, and practically impossible to change when they have been cemented in public imagination. On the set, Jay has the power to go again. To make a new take. To get one more for security. In life, however, he must live with the choices he has made. And when Jay reaches a certain age and begins to threaten with career tributes, he suddenly finds himself forced to see these choices back in a veritable supercut of great success and in -depth misunderstanding.
Which is to say that yes, “Jay Kelly” is a bubbly champagne drama that tries to wing a few tears from the unbefaable lightness of being rich and famous, but the fact that it looks like a lavazza commercial and bemoans the isolation of flying private Trade-offs that all of us are forced to make in this life-the one-way roads we take on the long and circular Journey Towards becoming ourselves. Baumbach lacks Sofia Coppola’s individual ability to utilize a character’s wealth because they want it revealing them, but he, Mortimer and Clooney share a living understanding of the announcements that can be formed in the space between who we are and how we see – and of how star can broaden that space to the point that friendships and families are responsible for the case.
It is a space that Baumbach explores here with an unusually mild touch. On the one hand, director “Meyerowitz stories” has never been as allergic to sentimentality as his prickliest work can suggest, and I have a hard time confusing any of the big filmmakers to be soft when they get older – we should all be so lucky to reach the back half of our lives and feel as if the world was a friendlier than we once we could. On the other hand, you can look at a director so Scabrous as Noah Baumbach make a movie as tenderly undamaged as “Jay Kelly” can feel like watching a Ginsu knife gets boring in a loofah.
Here, Baumbach compensates for the sometimes clumsy coated emotional by rooting his film in a foamed bedrock – one that adds a grooved edge to the constant rejection of “I was too busy with sex with movie stars to spend time with my daughters” melancholy. This grief is baked into the story from the beginning, when “Jay Kelly” begins with the death of a mentor figure named Peter (Jim Broadbent, seen in Flashback), who directed Jay’s Breakout success 30 years earlier. Peter was desperately shaking in Irrelevans the last time they spoke and had asked Jay to help him get his comeback project from the ground. Jay thought the project was too raw and vulnerable to his brand and was unmatched by Peter’s appeal to his branch duty. In the end, Peter failed to have the movie financed, and Jay can’t help but suspect it literally killed him.
That suspicion fraternizes something deep behind Jay’s eyes; It is a serious wrinkle in the face of someone whose job requires that he is always a dimple-cheated empty slate, smooth enough to play a variety of parts but always recognizable “itself.” An entire team of people has spent the best years in their lives ensuring that Jay never has to feel any worse than mild discomfort, his sweet about self -presuming boss Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler) manager among them, but they do not take up the aftermath of Peter’s death until after it is too late. They do not know what will happen when Jay is attracted to a bar for a drink after letters with her old actress school friend Timothy (Billy Crudup), who ages to a pediatrician with a serious chip on the shoulder.
The next thing that Ron knows, Jay has a black eye, he pulls out of the big new movie that he will start in a few days, and he charges the entire team on a plane to France as part of a very bad plan to crash his teenage daughter’s European holiday and spend some quality time with her before going to college in the fall. It is the perfect attitude for a Sturgian Misadventure across the continent, but “Jay Kelly” – more crazy than fun and increasingly trends against boring revelation – is less interested in striving for crazy laughs than it is to explore the life of the mind. And then a train journey overnight that puts Jay among the ordinary people becomes the arena for a head -travel down the memory field, complete with Trafalmadorian Flashbacks that mocks the movie star by denying him another take.
By design, “Jay Kelly” beats a troubled balance between moving forward and getting stuck earlier. The Long and Emotionally Imprecise Flashbacks-Which Find Jay Revitating The Critical Audition Where He Upstated Timothy, A Set Romance He Had WITH ONE OF HIS CO-STARS, and a more recent therapy Session, ESEFUNDED WITH HISSODED WITH ATTEUB Act as headwinds for a story about a man careening out of control, but none of them crackle with baumbach’s usual wit, and all of them suffer from a slightly raised tone that only earns “unreality” in Jay’s life by making all parts of the even more difficult to believe.
The Clooney plays only a more sad, more flashing version of himself-one who never found a lasting love, nor did a family he was interested in holding-acting all questions about Verisimilitude, and there are a number of sequences in “Jay Kelly” where his real fame adds the faith of them. There are also several moments where self -reflexivity of Clooney’s casting effectively behaves to believe that the Cary granting his day is to exclude its soul for our structure. That he waves us behind the stage and confesses the terrible truth that some part of ourselves always looked behind every red carpet smiling and Golden Globes acceptance speech. That he is not so happy. That his life is not perfect. That money, the look and an uneven driving over the six biggest seasons for all network dramas ever made does not make him better than us, even if the third thing objectively does.
The last of these moments is the heart that is exceeding, as Baumbach takes the full weight of Clooney’s iconography to carry Jay’s most private concern. The problem is that the rest of them relying on Clooney persona To get the job done, and – in sharp contrast to the incredible honesty of “funny people” – they are not enough to sell us on the idea that Jay can be such a dithing Cocker Spaniel in his private life (there is a reason why Ron always addresses him as a “puppy”, except that Ron addresses addresses all by his customers that way).
There is no benefit in incorrect Clooney for his performance, as no one makes Clooney better, and his leading man appeal in any way widened and “AW shucks” at the same time-have rarely been used more acutely than it is here. Unfortunately his ineffective clooney-ness also has the perverse effect of doing “Jay Kelly” less Convincing at the same time, at least as far as its main character is played by a man who makes all his shortcomings so much harder to believe. I’m sure George Clooney has his own problems, but No would be more difficult to inhabiting the problems that Glooney Is meant to have in this movie. The fact that Jay Kelly’s flaws collide against George Clooney’s charm is just the point, of course – one is simply not a match for the other.
It is up to the rest of the role to help compare the playing field, but the only “Jay Kelly” does with her traveling circus is to win them down one by one when they get tired of Jay’s discoveries. He is the plant -grown child who removes them from his actual children, and unpleasantly indifferent to the fact that he means more to them than they do to him in return.
Some employees, such as his publicist (Laura Dern), the castle at the first sign of real problems. Others, such as Ron, suffer from a largely sunken case to end him now. Sandler carries the shit out of a puffy polo -vest, and it’s fun to see him lead with silent departure instead of uncontrolled rage, but I don’t know if he has ever played in a movie that has given him less to do. While Baumbach uses Ron to Gesture at the specific Hollywood Complications of Mixing Business with Pleasure, and to Address the Sheer Number of People Who Are Subsumed Into the Personal Identity of a Single Brand-Name Star (“You ze ry Kell Character Never Develops Beyond The Tender Embodiment of All The Things His Boss Has Forfeited Along The Way, Including Self-Awareness, A Cohesive Family, and A wife played by Greta Gerwig.
Getting close to other people was something that Jay always planned to do later, and the prospect of getting a tribute from a Tuscan film festival is an inevitable sign that he has ended time. But other people would always be temporary for what really means about “Jay Kelly”, a wonderful bitter -cute shortcomings that hit the hardest as a precautionary story about the dangers to try to avoid in a world that only allows us to act as if there is someone else for us to be. Being a movie star just makes it much easier to forward the roles you were born to play.
Rating: B-
“Jay Kelly” premiered at 2025 Venice Film festival. Netflix releases it in selected theaters on Friday 14 November and on Netflix on Friday 5 December.
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