Jay Kelly Review: Noah Baumbach’s Lament On Stardom Is An Absolute Slog

Early in Noah Baumbach’s latest Netflix film, Jay Kelly, the titular star (George Clooney) wistfully remarks all his memories are movies. Life isn’t defined by the traditional mile stops. He missed them all, having buried himself in film sets or pursuing professional commitments. Kelly hones his screen image with the same polish and care his family pined for and never got. In spirit, Jay Kelly has a lot in common with the standard Baumbach film. Usual family fault lines are abundantly present. We witness the wear and tear in relationships, parents chafing against children, gestures towards reconciliation that sputter out. But none of this is skimmed with sincerity or perceptive intelligence. The script, which Baumbach co-wrote with Emily Mortimer, underlines rather than evokes, pontificates instead of loosely prising through the celebrated artist who might be a terrible person. The problem here is Baumbach’s curious indecision. He wants to make a simultaneously big, quiet drama, soaking in gorgeous Tuscany, where Kelly is headed for a tribute. Netflix has evidently endowed Baumbach with enormous scale. Yet, it has also homogenized Baumbach’s charming, clever voice.

We get mostly rote commentaries about the inevitable price of stardom, the endless existential hollow at its center. There’s something in here about the allure of yesteryear stardom papering into obsolescence. Of course, Kelly is fearful and wary of losing it. He retracts generosity which he could have easily shown a friend, an old actor fading out. Requested to back a film, Kelly excuses with his starry pedigree which he cannot afford to ruin. Does he even value the friendship?

This spills into the central relationship between Kelly and his decades-long manager, Ron (Adam Sandler). Ron’s job is high-wire, constantly whittling him away from his family. It’s a similar cost of fame. What Kelly has attained erodes all those in his vicinity. None of his relationships have stuck out for long, including his marriage that crashed on the rocks soon after the careful pretense of raising children vaporised. Ron suffers an identical fate. Attending to his boss’ moody, childish whims demands he chuck whatever binds him home. Sandler and Clooney are crushingly effective as their characters circle a realization of disposability. It takes Kelly’s publicist (a barn-storming Laura Dern) to put things in perspective for the loyal manager. Even as Ron unquestioningly gives it all for Kelly, does the latter even regard him as friend and family?

This could have assembled richer emotional throughlines, but Baumbach twitchily darts among scenes. Every subsequent memory of Kelly glimpsed only underscores the implicit. Baumbach filters the film through the lens of nostalgia, its romanticism and despair. The juxtaposition produces ironies but these aren’t baked into the screenplay so much as verbally enumerated.

It’s tough to even emotionally enter such a clouded film. There’s too much sentimental artifice clobbering it down into messy, nevertheless shapely outlines. Jay Kelly keeps zipping around, busying itself with whiffs and illusions of set-pieces. It pushes at the interface between film and life, both mingling without boundary. Yet we encounter the chasms. Kelly’s elder daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough), grudges his being an absent father. However, Kelly’s on-screen avatar lent itself to the perfect father prototype. Everyone is in thrall to the star that he is, dwarfing all human, fragile considerations. Even at the therapy session with Jessica, the facilitator slips into performance, enacting an emotional readthrough of her bitter, accusing letter.

Kelly’s stature eclipses his family, wholly razing his private life. He’s almost content to play as per his image. He’s a natural charmer. He’s not been on trains, among regular folks, for ages. But it doesn’t halt his effortless, immediate and sweeping impression on a general coach in a European train. He’s in command of the appeal he wields. He knows how to carry and propel the public love on a swell wave. Even after swaying all, he doesn’t pause. When a fellow passenger screams help over a thief getting away, Kelly rushes in as savior. He scampers out of the train. Unsurprisingly, all follow suit, lured by spectacle. To them, it’s a privilege to experience a sliver of what it’d be like in one of Kelly’s films. Once the thief is nabbed, we can almost intuit cut being called out. Yet, shock does cruelly register when Kelly realizes he’s surrounded and applauded for redoing in real life his own cinematic myth.

Jay Kelly hauls much of its emotional sinew from Nicholas Britell’s music. It sweeps over us in moving swathes. The climax is appropriately, predictably set to Kelly’s career highlights, spliced in from Clooney’s own credits, as the score ascends. The moment is too telegraphed to lift the film to any desired plaintive sublimity. Clooney never really finds the star’s loneliness. How much of Kelly is his intimate self, not designed projection? The core of it is as lost as Kelly to himself.