Jay Kelly ★★1/2
- 2filmcritics
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Availability: Still showing in some theaters. Streaming on Netflix, which has a collaboration with director Noah Baumbach, after the minimum 3-week run in theaters required for some awards nominations. For information on future wider availability, see JustWatch here.
Regrets, I’ve Had a Few…
“The best life—for men as well as women—is the ordinary life, with all its ‘human’ emotions, feelings, male/female conflicts, and imperfections.” That sounds a lot like the message of director Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly,” featuring a man who discovers that his movie star/celebrity career has left him feeling inauthentic, as well as distanced from people he should feel close to. Except we wrote those lines 2 years ago, about the epiphany experienced by Barbie, in Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s brilliant film “Barbie,” about a doll who, among other things, discovers the pleasures of being human.
Neither did we expect a film as relentlessly corny and bleak as this one.
It would be too much to expect that Baumbach, writing here without Gerwig, his wife (she has a minor role as Lois Sukenick in the film; the script was written by Baumbach and first-timer Emily Mortimer), would craft something as compelling, as sui generis as “Barbie.” But neither did we expect a film as relentlessly corny and bleak as this one. By the end of the film, Jay Kelly (George Clooney) has alienated his father; his life-long manager and agent, Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler); both of his daughters; Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), the director who gave him his first break; and probably (they don’t appear in the script) 2 ex-wives. In one of several flashbacks that weaken the film with their lack of subtlety, Kelly, depicted as an actor of limited range (“I do method-lite”), wins an audition over Tim (Billy Crudup), then a fellow film student with talent, by stealing his lines. “You stole my life,” says Tim.
In one of several flashbacks, Jay (George Clooney), back right, watches himself, here as the young acting student (Charlie Rowe) auditioning by stealing a fellow student's lines.
Not so different from Barbie’s alter-doll Ken, Jay is a clueless man-child. He calls Schneider “Pop,” suggesting the family Jay has discarded, and Ron calls him “Puppy,” appropriate for a guy who can’t even get himself a bottle of water. Having failed as an actor, Tim becomes a child therapist, and briefly (and not credibly) acts as a therapist for Jay and his angry, presumably “abandoned” adult daughter Jessica (Riley Keough, who’s had better roles). Our third film in a row about celebrities, and 2 of them with abandoned children in the film industry.
Jay is a clueless man-child.
Much of the action takes place in Europe, where Jay, who senses that Tim’s description of him as an “empty vessel” may not be entirely incorrect, goes to reconnect. Lacking insight into what other people might desire, he mistakenly assumes that his younger daughter Daisy (a miscast Grace Edwards) will want him to join her and her new French boyfriend on the standard late-teen European odyssey. Jay’s naivete is comically apparent when he boards a train in France, finds himself in a 2nd-class car, and discovers that ordinary people, whom he encounters as if they were animals in a zoo, can be “so nice” (while they are slobbering all over the movie icon). As Liz (Laura Dern, playing Ron’s colleague in coddling Jay), who has her priorities straight, puts it, celebrities are “never as humble as when they’re bragging.”
Jay (Clooney, center) reveling in the recognition that ordinary people
in the 2nd-class car on a train through France are "so nice."
The child-like Jay appears with force in a nonsensical scene in which he, having witnessed the theft of a purse and, unable to distinguish his real self from the actor/hero self, leaps from the train and pursues the thief through the French countryside.
Italians as a whole stand for authenticity. Here a lunch in an iconic Tuscan landscape
with Alba (Alba Rohrwacher), Jay's heretofore estranged father
(Stacy Keach), and Jay (Clooney), far right.
In tracking Jay’s search for humility and authenticity, the script takes us to Tuscany, where Jay has agreed to be honored with a “tribute,” and to encounters with Italians who, because they are Italian, can never fail to be authentic, including Alba (the talented Alba Rohrwacher from the TV series “My Brilliant Friend”).
Cheesecake is a metaphor for progress.
Though lacking any real self-understanding, Jay has regrets, often revealed in those regrettable flashbacks. One of them occurs as Jay is receiving his tribute. While images of his films fill the auditorium screen, Jay recalls—and regrets—the day he left home for work in the midst of his daughters presenting to their father a touching back-yard play. Curiously, the regrets have no consequences; they don’t result in any significant change in Jay Kelly. But wait a minute! There is one way that Jay does change; he learns to like cheesecake. In a scene as over-determined as it is ill-conceived, Jay, alone and contemplative, takes one bite of cheesecake, a dessert he has claimed he doesn’t enjoy. And then one more bite. Don’t over-think it; cheesecake is a metaphor for progress.
What purports to be the occasion for a genuine epiphany takes place in the shadows and fog of a Tuscan wood, with Jay thrashing around in what for him is psychic agony, while dirtying the white linen suit he’s donned for the tribute weekend. It’s all overdone, and all to no avail. Yes, as the first and final scenes make all too obvious, Jay wants “one more,” a do-over, another “take” in life. But what we see the next day at that tribute, as Jay is regaled with scenes from his illustrious acting career, are his eyes, darting up and down and side to side, a sign as disturbing as it is unclear for those seeking to bring meaning to the film. Perhaps we’re intended to observe a man without focus, without any idea of how to become the better person he can barely imagine.
The fellow acting student who blames Jay for his failed acting career, Tim (Billy Crudup), left, meets Jay (Clooney, right) at the classic Santa Monica dive bar (another icon of authenticity), Chez Jay, where Jay admits he hasn't been since he was a student.
There will be those who claim that the film is redeemed by the character of Ron, who suffers from the same excessive career focus as Jay but has the emotional IQ to make us care about him and even, we can hope, to change his life. Sandler is excellent in the role, and we do care about Ron as a victim. But it’s Jay’s picture. And George Clooney is, for better or for worse, just right for what Baumbach had in mind: a big, square-jawed handsome face. A great smile. A direct look that promises everything and delivers, well, not much.
Maybe Noah Baumbach just wanted to gut punch Hollywood and its culture of celebrity. Or, as we speculated in our 2023 review of “Barbie” (cheap psychology is the explanation of last resort), maybe there’s something going on at home.
He says: Baumbach was on the verge of being anointed. The ceremony will be delayed.
She says: We made a list of the trite scenes. Not a mark of a good film.
Date: 2025
Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Grace Edwards, Riley Keogh, Billy Crudup, Alba Rohrwacher, Jim Broadbent, Greta Gerwig, Charlie Rowe, Stacy Keach
Country: United States
Language: English, and some French and Italian subtitled in English
Runtime: 132 minutes
Other Awards: 7 wins (mostly odd categories) and 28 other nominations
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