“What if it wasn’t worth it?”
George Clooney is not Jay Kelly. But there is a degree of George Clooney in Jay Kelly. And vice versa. Their acting careers started about the same time and have gone in similar directions (strikingly so as we eventually see), and they are both at a point now where they are globally recognized superstar celebrities. And it is perhaps true of both that they find it exhausting. The biggest point of divergence is in their personal lives -Clooney does not have the grown daughters estranged from him that Jay does, and is not plagued with guilt over neglecting them. But you can believe he fears he might have in this alternate version of his life.
There have long been movies about how stardom is a difficult thing for a person, but director Noah Baumbach hits at it more pointedly than most. He and Clooney, along with co-writer Emily Mortimer, tap into some very honest aspects of the supposed emptiness of not just celebrity but aging celebrity -a head space where reflection and legacy are so vividly front of mind. But so too are of course those spaces and moments in life that have been obscured or flat-out forsaken in the miasma demanded by a public career. Clooney understands that deeply and that is where Jay Kelly emerges from him.
His eponymous film is of course set in the late stages of a celebrity movie star’s career. Finishing up his latest movie, Jay is struck by a trifecta of sobering incidents: a planned vacation with his youngest daughter before she leaves for college is disrupted by her disinterest in him, he learns that the director who gave him his start has suddenly died, and a reunion with an old acting school friend turns very very sour. To get away from these things and desperate to salvage his relationship with his daughter given the rocky terms he is on with his eldest, Jay impulsively drops out of his next movie and goes to Europe, ostensibly for a tribute in Tuscany. Following him along is his P.R. team, led by the loyal but exasperated manager Ron, played by Adam Sandler.
Ron is undervalued by Jay, who dismisses concerns of meeting with his old friend Tim (Billy Crudup) and then has to deal with the fallout of the sour encounter while spinning Jay’s erratic actions for a press and public Jay isn’t always fully considering. He also views himself as Jay’s one real personal friend amidst all the superficiality of Hollywood relationships, but though Jay depends on him he doesn’t see it the same way. It’s modestly true of his entire team, which also includes Laura Dern as his publicist Liz, with whom Ron once had a failed romance -but it is Ron who bears the brunt. And Sandler plays well the stress and uncertainty, the bottled frustrations at how his own personal life is impacted by his obligations to Jay -as well as the other arenas of his work. At one point, he meets with another star played by Patrick Wilson, who regrettably fires him due to Jay taking up the bulk of his attentions. It wouldn’t sting so much if Jay understood him.
Baumbach backgrounds this aspirational bromance much of the time though in interrogating Jay himself and his mixture of anxieties and regrets. There is a part of him that longs for a world away from his celebrity -it’s why he takes the reunion with Tim, a reminder of his life before. But Jay’s story of coming to fame is the not unfamiliar narrative of a guy accompanying his friend to an audition and being plucked out of obscurity in that context. But Tim was that friend, and as he notes nobody ever thinks about them. His resentment over the career he felt he should have deserved has an impact on Jay beyond a black eye, and he grapples with it thereafter in one of the most vulnerable performances Clooney has ever given. Perfectly aware of the character's connection to him, he reveals a sadder side of his relationship to his own fame -Clooney has handled his celebrity over the years terrifically well, but here he lets us glimpse a sense of the toll it has taken. And while he may not have had a neglected family through that career, there have no doubt been sacrifices and regrets in his life that have come as a consequence of it -which Baumbach and Mortimer's excellent script give him the ideal licence to relate.
Interspersed with his story through Europe, that involves him foiling a train thief and flying in his ailing father (Stacy Keach) in the hopes of having some family to celebrate his legacy with, the movie engages liberally in flashbacks to consequential points in his life, from the last time he saw that formative director Peter (Jim Broadbent) and declined to bankroll what would have been his last film to his days at drama school with Tim through that fateful audition. Thankfully cast with an actor (Charlie Rowe) rather than a de-aged Clooney, Jay relives these experiences as spectator, each organically tied into the mood of his reflections in the present. For example, he sees himself on the set of the movie that his daughter noted was hard to watch due to him playing with such warmth the father he never was to his own children.
And here he is looking down the end of his career, one of the most famous movie stars in the world as the consequence of all those experiences and choices that left people wounded in his tracks, and that question presents itself in a conversation with his elder daughter Jessica (Riley Keough): was it worth it? Was the life of luxury and adoration yet hollowed of meaningful relationships worth what it took to get there? Jay's cynicism is easy to get behind -it's not the first time the emptiness of celebrity has been ascertained as such, but rarely by someone as intimately familiar with it as Clooney in a manner that renders the very idea that much more potent. And yet celebrity alone is too easy a thing to blame -Jay has to accept his own accountability for what he chose to prioritize and how he chose to handle his celebrity. Those neglected relationships, perhaps especially the one with Ron -who does understand him more than anyone- need to be mended by him.
Baumbach does answer that question, and perhaps it is expected -the final sequence of the movie certainly works by addressing the art for the first time and blurring further those lines between Jay and Clooney -yet there is also one glowing memory, a rare moment of quality time with his daughters interrupted too quickly that feels perhaps like a conscious echo of a similar beautiful scene in All That Jazz -another great semi-biographical film. Between these an equilibrium is found, and Baumbach is openly sincere about it -he connects too to several of the moments and experiences here. Jay Kelly is his most nostalgic film, he and Clooney make good partners in pathos as they bring it to life. A movie that extols the humanity in celebrities without undercutting judgement, lamenting the alienation of that world, while giving credence to both regret and personal responsibility. A touching, revealing movie worthy of Jay Kelly's gravitas, and George Clooney's best in a decade.
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