In the first minutes of Noah Baumbach’s latest film, the titular Jay Kelly (George Clooney), a great Hollywood mega-star, is wrapping up the last scene of yet another blockbuster, and asks to do another take. The significance and allegorical nature of the request immediately become apparent, as Jay is up for an existential crisis: He’d like another stab at his life as well, since he believes he might be able to do better this time around.
The desire to reevaluate his life comes after the death of his mentor, the director who discovered him (Jim Broadbent), and the subsequent reunion with his old classmate (Billy Crudup), who informs him that he hates him for stealing his breakout role and his girlfriend years ago. This confrontation leaves Jay with a black eye and an insight that, aside from fans, most people in his life don’t like him all that much either.
His older daughter (Riley Keough) tends to only speak to him through her therapist, while the younger one (Grace Edwards) decides to get away for the summer. Using an upcoming retrospective of his works in Italy, Jay gathers his team and sets out, following her to Europe.
Jay Kelly, which premiered in Venice before landing in the NYFF program, is clearly a personal project for several of its creators: Noah Baumbach, his co-writer, Emily Mortimer (who makes a brief appearance in the film), and George Clooney, who recently spoke at length about his reflection on getting older and what it means for his career. Which only makes it more perplexing how a personal work like this ends up feeling like the most sanitized, Hollywood-polished version of inner turmoil possible.
Thematically, Jay Kelly seems to be trying to maneuver between two great classics – Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. Stylistically, though, it mostly navigates towards looking like a Hallmark movie.
From the opening, which features an epigraph from Sylvia Plath, to the final shot, where Clooney directly addresses the audience, ensuring everyone grasps the film’s core theme, Jay Kelly is woven from the most conventional clichés possible. The trip down memory lane is visualized by a series of episodes where Clooney walks through a train and literally walks into flashbacks.
Every time a potentially emotional scene starts, the string section kicks in. Any glimpse of an important idea or question is always repeated multiple times. Why is it easier to pretend to be someone else rather than yourself? Is creating art that makes hundreds of people happy worth letting down the ones closest to you?
Somewhere along the way, Clooney’s usually effortless, larger-than-life charisma somehow stops being convincing, until the very end, when we are finally treated to Jay’s retrospective, which consists of the actor's own older roles. Adam Sandler, with his much more reserved performance, ends up easily outshining him, playing a meaty role of Jay’s loyal manager, the only person who sticks with him 'till the end, and quietly wishes to at least be acknowledged as a friend.
But even he gets lost amid all the cameos by the actors (Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Stacy Keach, and so forth), who don’t have any particular reason to appear on screen other than Baumbach asking them to. Prominent European actors have it the worst, as they are forced to play walking cinematic stereotypes. Lars Eidinger is a German cyclist with a penchant for existential reflection of his own. Alba Rohrwacher is an Italian chaperone whose role mostly comes down to yelling “Bolognese!” a few times.
In 2007, there was another film featuring George Clooney at the Venice Film Festival – Tony Gilroy’s now largely forgotten directorial debut, Michael Clayton (we see snippets from it during the above-mentioned montage of Clooney’s roles). In it, the peak of Clooney’s character’s existential crisis is represented by a walk among the trees and encountering white horses. Almost 20 years later, Baumbach capitalizes on that depiction: the lowest point of Jay’s emotional journey is him walking through Italian woods – no horses, but he does wear a white suit and a tragic facial expression.
There are definitely certain more relatable moments that are deeply felt by Baumbach, Mortimer, and Clooney, like a brief interaction between Jay and his daughter, who informs him she might not go to college to star in her new boyfriend’s film, “a little something about dreams and memory”. That doesn’t change the fact that, at the end of the day, it is still a film where the authors try very hard to elicit sympathy for a rich, gorgeous-looking Hollywood powerhouse, whose biggest problem is that he is continuously being served a cheesecake everywhere he goes, when he doesn’t even like cheesecake.