Noah Baumbach turned 55 last September. And he works in the movie business, which has been in serious disarray over the past few years. It’s possible he would have made “Jay Kelly” without those two factors, but it’s even likelier that in this case, timing is everything.
“Jay Kelly,” which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, is suffused with melancholy for a business that seems to be on shaky ground and filled with a nostalgia for times gone by. For people of Baumbach’s age and his star George Clooney’s age (64), it is very much a movie of its time, which lends gravity and a touch of sadness to a film that otherwise stays light on its feet (and in another sign of the times, it’s being released by Netflix).
After Baumbach detoured into straight drama with 2019’s brutal relationship film “Marriage Story” and then stumbled with the uneasy drama-comedy hybrid of his Don DeLillo adaptation “White Noise” in 2022, this brings him back to dramedy with one of his most adroit and trickiest balancing acts to date – trickiest because, let’s face it, it’s not easy to retain a sense of lightness and humor when you’re dealing with the middle-aged panic of an overly pampered man of privilege.
Unless, of course, that man is played by George Clooney, in which it will look easy even if it isn’t. Clooney is the ideal person to play a big star who wears his stardom lightly but also has the self-awareness to realize that he’s coasting on that stardom; he can joke his way out of any situation without making you lose sight of the edge of desperation in every dazzling smile or purposefully modest one-liner.
Hell, even his name is perfect: One syllable first name + last name that begins with a k sound and ends with a y. Who else could possibly play Jay Kelly?
The film starts with an epigraph from Sylvia Plath that nods to the plight of movie stars, though it’s unlikely she thought so when she wrote it: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else, or nobody at all.”
Then there’s a very romanticized, glossy pan around a soundstage where a movie is being shot, with snatches of dialogue from actors, director, hairdressers, dolly grips; it’s a riff on the kind of oner that opens films like “The Player” and lives on in “The Studio,” but with a touch of the elegant dance that Francis Ford Coppola brought to “One From the Heart.”
But like Coppola’s version, this is a bittersweet elegance. We’re dropping in on this set on the last day of shooting, and its star is emotional as he says goodbye – both for this production, and for others. “One day,” he says, “it’ll be the last movie for all of us.”
Clearly, he’s been in that kind of mood lately; even before the plot kicks off, the movie finds its characters looking back and about trying to figure out how to move forward at a time when the art form that nurtured them is fading away. “All my memories are movies,” Jay says in a flashback conversation with his mentor, director Peter Schneider (an exquisite Jim Broadbent). “That’s what movies are for us,” Peter says. “Pieces of time.”
And yet for Peter, there will be no more time: He dies shortly after Jay turns down a role that might have gotten Peter his first directing assignment in many years. At the funeral, Jay runs into Timothy (Billy Crudup), his old acting-school roommate. They go out for what seems like a cordial round of drinks, but Timothy finally lets it out: “I’ll be honest with you. I can’t stand you. You stole my life.”
That’s not exactly true, but it turns out that Timothy lost his big shot at stardom when Jay accompanied him to an audition and then decided to read for the part himself in the spur of the moment. In one of the film’s most deftly executed conceits, this and other flashback scenes play out with the current-day Jay standing in the corner of the room watching his younger self – and in all of those scenes in which Jay watches his life play out and tallies up his regrets, Clooney is heartbreaking without saying a word.
It would be tempting to say that “Jay Kelly” belongs to Clooney, but that’s not true. Adam Sandler has his own wrenching moments as Kelly’s long-suffering manager, as do Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Stacy Keach and an arsenal of supporting players that includes Patrick Wilson, Eve Hewson, Greta Gerwig, Alba Rohrwacher, Isla Fisher and the film’s co-writer, Emily Mortimer.
That acting arsenal makes sense thematically, too, because Jay lives surrounded by his own arsenal. When he decides to follow his daughter on a European vacation, he doesn’t just have somebody book a first-class ticket; instead, half a dozen black SUVs pull up in a hanger and disgorge a retinue of managers, publicists, hair and makeup artists and everyone else it takes to get the Jay Kelly Act on the road.
The film turns into a European vacation of sorts, but one in which Jay pays a lot of extra fees for all the psychological baggage he’s dragging around with him. As the weight of that baggage builds up, the mundane questions (“Should I tell my daughter that I’ve been spying on her through her friend’s mom’s credit card charges?” “Who’s going to come to my lifetime achievement tribute in Tuscany?”) are overwhelmed by the heftier ones (“Should I blow off that movie that’s supposed to start next week?” “Should I let my hair go completely gray?” “Who am I when I’m not acting?”), and some of the comic shenanigans begin to feel a little silly.
But the key is to find the balance – to make a movie that’s simultaneously light and dark, one that moves like a comedy but has a lot on its mind. With an assist from composer Nicholas Britell, who at times seems to be evoking past Baumbach collaborator Randy Newman, “Jay Kelly” manages to do that with a quiet assurance.
Two years after he helped his wife Greta Gerwig write a groundbreaking movie about young women and their dolls, Baumbach has taken up the cause of aging men in a crumbling Hollywood. The film is a showcase for a movie star who knows how to do that job and for a couple of guys who are showing their age — and in this case, that’s a good thing.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.
