3 months ago
6
FILM
Jay Kelly ★★★ ½
(M) 132 minutes
Is George Clooney a movie star, or just an actor who specialises in playing one? He looks sharp in a suit, and has outwardly been in the sweet spot of middle age for the past three decades - both movie star qualities. But there are fewer hits than you might expect – or at least, fewer movies that became hits because the public was drawn to Clooney in particular.
Jay Kelly, on the other hand, is definitely a movie star. But Noah Baumbach’s new comedy-drama Jay Kelly is not a portrait of Clooney, although Clooney slips smoothly into the role of Jay, and whatever charisma Jay possesses is Clooney’s first.
Adam Sandler (left) plays George Clooney’s loyal manager, Ron.
Jay too has been around for decades, and has done it all, without losing his credibility or cool. His pampered life outwardly leaves him with little to worry about, not that he was ever the fretful type.
Still, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself what it’s all amounted to, especially given the sacrifices he’s made to stay at the top: the failed marriages, the friends left behind, the time away from his kids.
Baumbach co-wrote the screenplay for Barbie, directed by his wife Greta Gerwig, and like Barbie this film can be viewed as a variant on the Pinocchio theme: the puppet yearning to become a real boy.
Jay’s mock-heroic quest takes him from LA to Paris, where he reunites with his younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), and then on to Tuscany, where he’s due to receive a special tribute teed up by loyal manager Ron (Adam Sandler). This cues a series of flashbacks covering different aspects of his past, where he’s sometimes played by young British actor Charlie Rowe.
It sounds potentially corny, and also like an uphill battle to keep us interested in the internal struggles of this extremely fortunate man. The movie keeps threatening to turn sentimental and finally does: with a bit of rejigging, the final sequence could have been left out altogether, which would have been a good idea.
Still, up to that point Clooney, Baumbach and the film’s co-writer Emily Mortimer between them offer a partially satirical, mostly clear-eyed take on their hero: his sunny self-involvement, his genuine but also possibly limited talent, and the way his celebrity operates as a force field affecting everyone around him.
Much of the time this is less a film about Jay than about how the supporting characters react to the Jay-shaped space at the story’s centre. It’s also about the nature of acting, generously allowing one cast member after another a chance in the spotlight – with Sandler, in his heyday a bigger star than Clooney ever was, coming closest to stealing the show.
The nudging self-awareness peaks with the casting of Billy Crudup as a gifted acting school classmate of Jay’s who dropped out of the industry (he’s become a “child therapist,” a typical Baumbach gag). In reality, Crudup never quite achieved the stardom that once looked like his for the taking, though it’s easier to imagine him playing Clooney’s role here than the other way round.
Given Baumbach’s own career has lasted almost as long as Clooney’s, he might be wondering if he in turn could be described as a “hero of cinema,” a label pinned on Jay by a fan. Not quite, in my eyes. But a man who can envisage Sandler and Laura Dern as a couple who never were has at least occasional flashes of genius.
