Jay Kelly is probably the easiest film to understand. The conversation it’s having with the audience is pretty simple to see. In Noah Baumbach’s new film, which he co-wrote with Emily Mortimer (who also plays a role), about an aging movie star played by George Clooney named the eponymous Jay Kelly, who’s having a bit of a crisis of faith in his choices. After the death of the director who discovered him and a very disruptive reunion with a former friend, Kelly starts to question whether what he gave up to be a movie star was worth it. At the same time, we have Adam Sandler’s Ron Sukenick, Jay’s dutiful and overprotective manager. His constant focus on making sure Jay is okay and getting him what he needs, even at times before Jay knows he needs it, might not be worth the sacrifices he’s made. He wonders how does Jay sees him and cares about him as a person at all, compared to how he sees Jay as a member of his family.
Baumbach and Clooney use this film to interrogate Clooney himself. While not a version of his backstory or his life, it does pull from our idea of Clooney and his stardom. The idea of the waning power of what a movie star is all over this film. The film uses clips from Clooney’s own resume to flesh out Jay Kelly’s career in the film. A big part of the conflict for Jay starts when he meets his old friend Timothy Galligan (Billy Crudup), who at first is friendly, then becomes combative. It reframes Jay’s past in his eyes – was he the bad guy? Was his ambition destructive, and was this blind ambition destructive to everyone around him?
The film then gets into some dream-like flashbacks where Jay, in his mind, walks through his own memories like an actor on a movie set. He walks through like a producer in the back watching what’s being filmed on camera. For Jay, his whole life is like a series of films, and he looks back like a person sitting back watching classics they’ve loved their whole life, from the highs and lows. Charlie Rowe plays the younger Jay in these scenes and does a good job, and is believable even if you remember Clooney at that age from watching The Facts of Life or Roseanne back in the 80s.
In this film, you’re getting the Adam Sandler from Punch Drunk Love or one of my favs, Spanglish. This is the Sandler that gets people mad because he makes things like Happy Gilmore 2 or Click. Ron spends so much of this film worrying about Jay and trying his best to keep the whole team that keeps Jay going together, even as everyone around him tells him that Jay doesn’t care about him – he’s just the help. There are some great scenes with Laura Dern as Liz, the publicist who has a past that you learn about during the trip to Italy for the lifetime achievement award Jay is receiving.
A lot of Sandler’s performance is built on his realization that maybe he puts too much of himself into his two clients, primarily how he focuses so much on Jay, with mostly no acknowledgement. For Jay, his dynamic with his two daughters haunts the whole film. His youngest daughter, Daisy, who’s about to go to college, is pretty ambivalent to her father; he’s not that serious, even though she loves him. She’s more of a parent than he is, and this is played perfectly by Grace Edwards. Now the dramatic tension is with Riley Keough’s Jessica, the eldest daughter, and the one who wants nothing to do with him. Her resentment is his most significant wound and crack in his ambition. That’s his great loss. Not his best friend or his wife – or any love for that matter. Keough is fantastic here as a character you empathize with and understand, but also feel like maybe she’s a bit too hard on her father. The scenes between Clooney and Keough just feel, at times, like you’re with people during a very personal and difficult family moment that you wish you weren’t seeing.
Linus Sandgren is the Cinematographer on this film, working with Baumbach as a great team to put some very good shots on the screen. Unlike most, I had the opportunity to watch Jay Kelly in a movie theater, and it was quite excellent. The opening sequence with a continuous shot on a crane is excellent and sets the tone early on that this is a film that loves film and the idea of Hollywood, a concept that is just as the star is starting to fade and become a thing of the past. Even as the film makes the concessions with the types of shots we see with compositions and framing that work on the big screen, and those people have at home, it does have a cinematic feeling. I could tell a lot of care went into this.
When the film was over, I knew instantly that not only did I love it but that it was one of my favorites of the year. This film, along with F1 and One Battle After Another, hit more than ever that the movie star still has some weight. A pure presence on the screen informed by those that came before, and George Clooney does it better than all of his peers who reached that level in the ‘90s. Jay Kelly is a film that does what it does perfectly, and it can capture the audience in the most effortless way.
Rating: A
Level of Enthusiasm: 20%
