After wrapping up his latest film with a new project already lined up, Jay Kelly (George Clooney) tries to reconnect with his daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards), before she leaves on a trip with friends to Europe.  Fearing that he is losing precious time with his daughter, he follows her to Europe, leading his panicked manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), and publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), to drop everything and bring Jay back to the project. 

Noah Baumbach continues his partnership with Netflix, directing Jay Kelly, a 132-minute industry drama he co-wrote with Emily Mortimer.  The film premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, where both Clooney and Sandler’s work in front of the camera was well lauded.  

With over 40 years in front of the camera, Clooney has entered that stage of his career where his presence on screen is almost inseparable from his status as a movie star.  In Jay Kelly, as distracting as it may be to see him on screen, this aspect of stunt casting works in the film’s favor, though Baumbach and Mortimer’s script does not interrogate the phenomenon quite as much as audiences would prefer.  Instead, the entire affair comes off as an ever-so-slight stroking of Clooney’s ego, reassuring the actor of his place in the industry and even treating him – through his character – to a prestigious lifetime achievement award and retrospective.  Admittedly, that is an overly cynical reading of the film, but because the script does so little of substance to prove otherwise, audiences can be forgiven for finding this work to be little more than a puff piece for someone already well accused of being a coastal elite. While Linus Sandgren’s cinematography never captures Clooney with his arms outspread in the most obvious pose of a Christ allegory, the camera is constantly capturing this pilgrim performing his miracles of personality while on his trek across Europe to be crowned not with thorns, but with laurels. Like a king born in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes, he travels among the masses on the railway, suffering through an economy ticket as first class has been booked up from the post-Easter celebrations. As he communes with them, the regular people look up in awe towards Jay as if he just fed them bottomless fish and loaves. Later, in a graveyard, instead of raising Lazarus from the dead, he instead beats up a thief and returns a stolen pocketbook to its rightful owner.

That hollow and slightly narcissistic feeling is only felt more strongly as the film opens up to include the much more interesting people around the title character.  Dern’s Liz brings a softness to the world of the film by the very nature of her role in Jay’s life as his publicist, but she also has a steely resolve around her not unlike her role as a divorce lawyer in Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019).  She is endlessly fascinating to watch as she walks the tightrope of curating Jay’s brand while simultaneously commiserating with Ron about some of their shared frustrations in regards to their client.  Their near constant influence over the flow of the first half of the film brings about the interesting dispelling of the myth of the movie star; that they have done it all on their own.  It opens the film up to be a celebration of and an ode to the behind the scenes work that keeps the industry running, but all of that is waved off through way-too obtuse dialogue about a shared romantic history between Ron and Liz, and then scraps that attempt at a thesis all together only to show us – with the intent of building empathy – the plight of the leading man. 

More supporting evidence that Jay Kelly is an ill-calibrated film in which everyone in Jay’s orbit is exponentially more interesting and provides more narrative depth comes early in the film in the form of Timothy (Billy Crudup), an old classmate of Jay’s when they were back in acting school.  Originally going to an audition just as moral support for Tim, Jay asks to read and is eventually offered the role by the director, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), thus launching Jay’s career.  Opening up to the idea of what could have been, the film never seems to allow Jay a moment to realize the lucky strike that set him up on this path, and while Tim is certainly not destitute as a child psychologist, it is not the life that he had dreamed of having.   

Further, it almost seems as if we as the audience to Jay Kelly are to understand that Jay Kelly is not a good actor – serviceable, sure – but Baumbach is either too sloppy and unspecific in his direction and on the page respectively to make this a modern parable of the emperor without any clothes, or he truly set out to make a vanity piece for Clooney.  It is honestly hard to tell, especially when the final line of the film delivered by Clooney is “Can I go again? I’d like another one.” does not seem to be coming from a place of understanding and regret for this character, hoping this time to bring the people he has alienated from him closer, but rather just to see his highlight reel again and revel in his own glory a little while more. Released in the December corridor around the same time that audiences will undoubtedly be queuing up their favorite rendition or two of “A Christmas Carol,” such a muted telling of an elder statesman having a change of heart does not land with much of an impact. One does not believe that Jay would deliver a Christmas feast or throw an extra lump of coal into the furnace; his selfishness is, if anything, even more well defined at the end of this film than it was at the start.