A former editor-in-chief of mine once told me to write lightly about heavy matters, and heavily about light ones — an adage that easily applies to Noah Baumbach’s and Emily Mortimer’s remarkable screenplay for Jay Kelly. On paper, Baumbach’s thirteenth feature, about the end-of-career crisis of the titular aging movie star (George Clooney, in a brazenly self-referential role), may sound trite. The resulting film, however, is anything but. Baumbach has managed to follow up his strained Don DeLillo adaptation White Noise (2022) with a wondrous bit of movie magic — a remarkably earnest dramatic comedy full of existential crises that constantly sparkles due to its playful grace notes.
Fittingly, the plot kicks off with a taste of real movie magic. Baumbach grants us a peek behind the Hollywood curtain, flexing a sweeping oner to present the film set as the stage for a polyphonic symphony of wildly differing characters that somehow manage to cooperate in lieu of assembling a film. All the oscillating crew members in this delicate constellation gradually make way for the real star: magnetic film icon Jay Kelly, who is one take away of the picture lock for what might be his final film. Expiration is suddenly on his mind now, with graying hairs and film festival invites for lifetime achievement awards as ominous warnings of the beginning of the end. Perhaps that’s why Kelly, a divorced dad of two grown-up daughters, starts to gravitate toward his family. Understandably, though, they have zero emotional need for a man who, in the past 35 years, has constantly chosen his career over intimate familial relationships.
The double whammy of his youngest daughter flying off on an Eurotrip for the summer, plus the passing of a filmmaker who served as Kelly’s surrogate father, fuels a sudden desire to break out of his pillowy prison of luxury and artifice. Coming awkwardly close to parental stalking, Kelly retraces his daughter’s itinerary, dragging his manager Ron (a brilliant Adam Sandler, in one of his all-too-rare dramatic roles), plus the rest of his sizable professional entourage, along for an adventurous road trip from Paris to Tuscany. All this sudden flux allows Baumbach to carefully dissect the tormented psyche of an actor in his desperate attempt to feel human again. “How can I play people,” Kelly muses after a series of hilarious interactions with the plebs in a train wagon, “when I don’t see people; don’t touch people.”
From this point on, Jay Kelly mostly alternates between two types of scenes. Humorous chance encounters with ordinary people rekindle Kelly’s sense of humanity, while the more fantastical side of things finds the aging star veering off in key memories that shaped his life and career. You can feel that Baumbach has a couple of new tricks up his sleeve after sculpting the fugue-like narrative of White Noise, specifically in the fluid ways he lets Clooney step into scenes of his past, as if he’s the audience of his previous life that unfolds like a farcical play. The looming anxiety of an aging, lonely man who struggles with past guilt is extremely palpable here, and it shouldn’t be too much to state that Jay Kelly represents a singularly high point in Clooney’s career — one that in the last decade or so has been plagued by Nespresso commercials and diminishing returns in more serious cinema fare.
What mostly shines through in Baumbach’s film, however, is the emotionally charged dynamic between Clooney and Sandler. The fraught bond between Kelly and Ron, who have built an ostensible friendship from a purely transactional relationship, turns out to be the central site of tension in Jay Kelly. With films like Greenberg and The Meyerowitz Stories, Baumbach has proven how deftly he can explore the porous nature of social connection. Here, he applies all that emotional discomfort to a larger-than-life celebrity who, over the course of the film, is painstakingly dragged back to the realm of ordinary human living. Jay Kelly is surprisingly moving in exploration of all the sacrifices Ron has made in private to keep Kelly’s stardom afloat, and the staggering amount of familial and relationship drama that Ron and others have had to endure, beyond Kelly’s knowledge, illustrates a keen understanding of social and relational complexity that proves foundational to the film’s larger layers of drama.
And then, in a cheeky bit of meta self-referentiality, Baumbach grants us a bit more movie magic. When Kelly finally does accept a lifetime achievement award, the montage reel during the ceremony consists entirely of snippets of Clooney’s earlier acting work. It’s a tremendous joke in itself, one that also hints at how much Clooney has mined his own life to inhabit this tragic character. That Baumbach, Clooney, Sandler, et al. have managed to squeeze so much comedic gold and genuine pathos out of such an existential, and arguably personal, downer only illustrates what a wondrously strange picture Jay Kelly is.
Published as part of Venice Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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