"Jay Kelly:" We Are So Baum-back

I know that some people have their personal gripes with the current era of filmmakers and stars making slightly self-indulgent meditation films on their collective careers, but I’ve found nearly all of them so far to be my cup of tea. Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken Noah Baumbach this long to jump on the train. He’s no stranger to making movies that help him reckon with his past and legacy, however with Jay Kelly, starring the very similar sounding name of George Clooney, this is Baumbach at his least subtle. Some have already, and will continue to take issue with that literalness, but I found that to be the film’s greatest strength. 

George Clooney plays the titular character, Jay Kelly a past-his-prime, moderately reckless actor who decides to simultaneously follow his daughter to Europe, and drag his team with him to Italy where he is soon to receive a lifetime achievement award. 

The film opens with an absolutely stunning shot around a film set, culminating in Clooney giving his dying breath in his newest blockbuster film. The little intricacies we get to observe about his character in these opening moments are ones that are going to carry us through the entire rest of the film. Not that the film stops exploring him as a person beyond the opening, but its efficiency and ability to continuously evolve Jay Kelly’s mystique is nothing short of admirable. 

Clooney's co-leads include Adam Sandler and Laura Dern along with some surprise supporting performances that I was unaware of before watching the film, so I’ll preserve that for you readers as well. Sandler is great, as he always is when someone actually thinks to give the man any sort of direction, but the immediate Oscar hype for his performance that came out of the film’s premiere did seem majorly overhyped to me. I think everyone is desperate to just give this man his flowers (myself included), but I feel like a performance like this would be kind of an underwhelming one to give it for. Especially considering how stacked the Supporting Actor category already is this year. 

And as a surprise to no one, the film is hilarious. A lot of the humor relies on you having the ability to feel sympathy for someone like Jay Kelly who is undeniably a bull in a china shop. Seemingly ungrateful, in the midst of a ⅔ life crisis, selfish, has everything but feels nothing archetypes are obviously nothing new. But as reflected in the attitudes of the people around him in the film…his antics get particularly grating. It would probably be really difficult for anyone other than George Clooney to play the part, because he’s utterly impossible to not just immediately swoon over. 

You could snag any individual frame from this movie, and immediately (and correctly) assume it’s a Netflix movie. It is perhaps the most Netflix Holiday movie looking movie of the year. But, none of the other Netflix Holiday movies have Linus Sandgren as their cinematographer, so you’ve got to take your wins when they present themselves. Despite me consistently having the thought in the back of my mind of how gorgeous these locations would look if they were shot on 35, Sandgren still makes the overly sleek, pompous grade of the whole thing look totally enveloping. 

Jay Kelly also has an impressively broad thematic rap sheet involving varying perspectives on nostalgia, nihilism, cynicism, existentialism, and about every other -ism you can probably think of. Obviously given this, the delivery of these perspectives is going to be far more literal and dialogue based than some people are probably hoping, but for every on-the-nose, unsubtle delivery the film has, there’s at least one other moment that swept me off my feet. It all culminates in a final scene that moved me far more than I expected it to, and has stuck with me heavily in the month it’s been since I first saw the film. 

The bottom line is that Jay Kelly is Noah Baumbach at his most accessible in a very long time. If that’s for better or worse is entirely up to you, but for everything I noticed in this film that could potentially be a turn-off, I somehow wound up being almost completely won over by it in the end. The film is doing a very limited theatrical run right now, and will be hitting Netflix on December 5th, I'd recommend you see it.