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*/**** starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dern written by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimer directed by Noah Baumbach
by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sloppy love of movies paired with a genius-level creator. You see the problem. I have admired many of Baumbach’s works, both individually and in collaboration with Wes Anderson, but I’ve never found any of them to be particularly in rapture over the transformative potential of film as a medium. I have admired much of George Clooney’s work, but have never found him to be a once-in-a-lifetime talent with a deeply troubled backstory like, say, Bob Fosse. The closest analogue to Jay Kelly is actually Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Jay Kelly (Clooney) is George Clooney, the “last movie star.” Jay is cozy with Big Chill nostalgia at the funeral for the director who discovered him until he runs into his old pal Timothy (Billy Crudup), whom Jay, we see in flashback, outshone at the latter’s “big break” audition, stealing, in Timothy’s mind, the career and stardom that should have been his. Stunned that he isn’t universally beloved, Jay starts to worry he hasn’t spent enough time with his estranged daughters and gets his team of handlers and assorted paid sycophants to track down his youngest, Daisy (Grace Edwards), on her holiday in Europe. The plan is to intercept her and force her to attend a career tribute being thrown for him in Italy. But he’s supposed to start shooting his new movie in a couple of days! Oh, no! Along for the mad, mad, mad, mad ride are his long-suffering manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), his equally long-suffering publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), and assorted hairstylists and make-up people, all feeling very put out by the private jets and public trains they’re forced to take for a mere 15% of Jay’s outlandish salary. Is it a hard-knock life, trying to herd an inveterate narcissist away from his late-life crisis? Man, don’t get me started.
Which is my way of saying, who gives a shit about this person’s problems? Jay isn’t a great guy, nor is he a bad guy. He could’ve been a better dad, I suppose, but his kids seem pretty loved. He’s ridiculously successful and his team is well looked-after as a result; if Jay doesn’t consider them bosom buddies, it’s because they probably wouldn’t do what they do for him for free. Not being thought of as a friend hurts Ron, by the way. As played by Sandler at his gentlest and most nurturing, Ron is genuinely injured to discover that the many sacrifices he’s made in his life to keep the Jay Kelly machine running only indicate to Jay that Ron’s been doing his job. Jay doesn’t get along with his dad (Stacy Keach) but sends a jet to retrieve him anyway, having decided that he’d like to have him at the tribute because he wants the old man to understand what it was all for. A shame that Jay’s older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough) doesn’t want anything to do with him anymore and that Daisy is horrified he’s stalked her across continents to try to railroad her and her friends into attending an ossified film festival, but at least he’ll have his dad there, the guy who never wanted him to be an actor in the first place.
Throughout the film, Warren Zevon’s grim ode to fame and fortune “Splendid Isolation” kept popping into my head, with its line about Michael Jackson renting out Disneyland so he doesn’t “have to share it with anyone else. Lock the gate, Goofy, take my hand. And lead me through the world of self.” Dripping with Zevon’s trademark irony and rapier-sharp observational wit, it happens to handily skewer everything that’s wrong with Jay Kelly. “Jay,” you see, isn’t significant enough to be as revered as he is by this movie, within or without. Consider how, during the climactic montage of his work that includes clips from such real-life Clooney landmarks as Leatherheads, The Peacemaker, and…did I spot One Fine Day(?), Baumbach frequently cuts to the faces of a rapt festival audience mesmerized, nay, enchanted by the glory of Jay Kelly’s astonishing career. We’re not talking about Bicycle Thieves here, are we? The few seconds from The Thin Red Line only serve to remind how little of it starred George Clooney. What exactly are the old Italian men swiping away tears over? The Midnight Sky? The Monuments Men? Up in the Air? Baumbach appears to come to terms with this fundamental flaw when he has Kelly cry out, “I want a do-over!” A bit late for that, alas: the picture has spent too long pickling in treacle to lose its sickly-sweet aftertaste. Jay Kelly wants to preserve the inviolability of its sacred cake and eat it, too. It wants to be a bruising study of a failed man and an unironic celebration of a great artist. I don’t think you can do both of those things. Not unless you truly are a genius. Like Bob Fosse, for instance.
