At some point in the middle of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Laura Dern’s character, Liz—she’s part of the entourage accompanying George Clooney’s title character on a trip to Italy—gets up and walks out of the movie, never to return. Maybe she’s trying to tell us something.
The character of Jay Kelly is more or less an amalgam of Clooney himself, a renowned A-list American movie star gathering laurels in his mid-60s but desperately striving for something more personally meaningful. As imagined by director Baumbach (White Noise, Frances Ha) and co-writer/actor Emily Mortimer, Jay’s life alternates hectically between his routine studio acting jobs and satisfying the demands of his clamoring fan base—a group that includes his starved-for-affection family.
This movie lays an egg. There are writing problems. Despite one or two bits of ordinary soul-searching dialogue, Clooney is no help, and neither are Adam Sandler (as his agent), Greta Gerwig (cameo as a frazzled mom) or the aforementioned Dern. The story is incredibly tedious, with lifeless line readings and a maudlin melancholy it can’t shake—no matter how much it borrows from similar modern anxiety-mobiles by Federico Fellini (8 ½), Woody Allen (Stardust Memories), or Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up).
Baumbach wastes a cast most filmmakers would kill for.
Sandler, a revelation as a doomed sports gambler in the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, mostly just wanders around the European scenery in a dazed condition in the role of Jay’s agent Ron, idly kvetching with his client. Ron’s family back in the states is a further cliché. We immediately want to get as far away from his spoiled, anxious wife (Gerwig in cameo) as possible, ditto for their kids.
Jay has family jitters of his own. His needy daughters’ struggles to find their niche trigger several regretful flashbacks from Jay’s scuffling early years in showbiz—anxious auditions, the selfish insecurity of actors, etc. And then there’s Jay’s garrulous old dad (Stacey Keach), tagging along on the Italian film festival date—he’s endearing to his son because he can’t remember all the disappointments. Added to that is the unexpected appearance of Timothy (Billy Crudup), a resentful former acting-class “buddy” who just won’t let go.
It occurs to us once again—in the wake of Marriage Story and most of his early films—that Baumbach thrives, often dubiously, on unsuccessful characters. Here, too many of them have a habit of breaking down in tears. As in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, comical/grotesque faces pop in and out of the frame in a blurry procession, Jay’s personal demons, whenever he gets too close to his public. Nobody really wants to spend time with Jay. Ultimately, neither do we.
Baumbach concocts a couple of sequences to break up the general inertia. The free-for-all on the crowded French train spends a few precious minutes on slapstick, with Jay asserting himself as a hero thwarting a pair of would-be thieves—or was it just his imagination again? One of the thieves is played by German actor Lars Eidinger, notable as the unhinged heir to an armament manufacturing family in the stylish miniseries Babylon Berlin. Baumbach uses Eidinger primarily for his untrustworthy appearance, but laid alongside some of Jay Kelly’s other cameos—Jim Broadbent, co-writer Mortimer (as Jay’s production gofer), Dern, et al.—a note of Euro-corruption is welcome relief.
In the film’s final quarter, when Jay breaks away from the other characters to dream-walk alone through a misty night-time forest, the film finally makes use, literally, of the disturbing darkness of his personality. Does he encounter more ghosts from his guilty past? Or is it just the fevered hallucinatory presence of his daughter Jessica (Riley Keough)?
Jay Kelly is an uncomfortable anti-vehicle for Clooney, a curious mash-up of psychological hand-wringing and aimless bits of unconnected character chatter. Well-intentioned admirers of both Clooney and Baumbach probably have better ways to spend 132 minutes.
In theaters now; on Netflix starting Dec. 5.
