It goes without saying that a person who is or was a famous millionaire is unlikely to elicit sympathy, but sometimes such individuals can break our hearts, despite our prejudices against them.
On the strength of his stellar new Hollywood drama, Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach understands this irony better than most. The movie, which debuted on Netflix on Dec. 5 following a brief theatrical run, centers on a movie star around whom minions, handlers, and advisers flit as though he is still a consequential figure. Against such appearances, 60-year-old Jay Kelly (George Clooney, doing unusually sensitive and soulful work) is persuaded that he is friendless, worries that he has been a derelict father to his grown daughters, and is sent into a post-midlife midlife crisis upon learning of the demise of the director who launched him to stardom.
The last event is not only the firmament against which the story unfolds but almost unquestionably the entry point for Baumbach, who, between Marriage Story (2019), White Noise (2022), and this film, suddenly looks like one of America’s most ambitious and assured filmmakers. In the film’s first scenes, Jay is made aware of the death of, and remembers in a lovely extended flashback, the director in question, Peter Schneider. Played by Jim Broadbent, Schneider shares the first name, an erudite disposition, and a penchant for fashionable neckwear with the director Peter Bogdanovich, who died in 2022. For at least 25 years, Baumbach was a supporter and something of an encourager of Bogdanovich, who, by the time they met, had fallen from the heights of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon into a morass of failed projects, financial insecurity, and periodic desperation. He also had enduring reserves of charm and courage.
To make Jay Kelly enjoyable and indeed comprehensible to the multitude of noncinephiles who will see it, Baumbach modestly disguises Schneider, who was given a British accent and a bald pate but otherwise shares the opinions and circumstances of his real-life antecedent. To wit: Schneider refers to movies as “pieces of time” (the title of a famous Bogdanovich book), speaks of wanting to make a “picture” about a prostitute (presumably Bogdanovich’s last film, Squirrels to the Nuts, which Baumbach executive-produced and whose heroine was a prostitute-turned-actress), quotes Francois Truffaut to the effect that “quantity is impressive” in a filmography (as Bogdanovich did to me and, apparently, to Baumbach), is said to have directed on horseback (which Bogdanovich did on his famous flop Nickelodeon) and to have once resided in a mansion known as Cosa del Oro (in contrast to Bogdanovich’s Copa de Oro), and admits his insolvency as his prime reason for wanting to keep directing. For heaven’s sake, Jay even calls Schneider “Pop,” as Baumbach did Bogdanovich.
In real life, Baumbach came to the aid of Bogdanovich by, along with Wes Anderson, throwing his weight behind Squirrels to the Nuts, a movie with otherwise near-hopeless prospects for production. But in sketching the uneasy, shifting relationship between the outwardly successful, still-breathing Jay and the now-deceased Schneider, Baumbach tenderly shows how swiftly great men can be reduced to states of neediness or dependency. He also knows they are worth caring about.
I know, I know: this sounds like inside baseball — a film nerd’s checklist — but it provides the real, thumping heartbeat of Jay Kelly, which achingly sketches the proximity of Schneider to Jay. The sudden, shaking death of the old director is the first domino to fall in a process that leads Jay to spontaneously abandon his new movie and chart a course to Paris in pursuit of his daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), who would rather attend a jazz festival than hang out with her semi-estranged father, and to make an appearance at a lifetime-achievement tribute in Tuscany, where he travels by train. Another domino is Jay’s barfight with Billy Crudup’s Timothy, a long-ago fellow acting student whose animosity can be written off as resentment, but who nonetheless seems capable of peering into Jay’s soul. This is a ghostly movie.
On the continent, Jay becomes divorced from his usual habits, if not his entourage, which includes his efficient, unbelievably tolerant manager Ron (Adam Sandler) and his freaking-out publicist Liz (Laura Dern). Of course, his fame proves resilient. “Are you you?” a civilian train passenger asks Jay. “And will you be using the same bathroom as us?” Clooney has found his most natural part since the days of Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven: a graying, doubting movie star who, in a flash, becomes cognizant of his mortality and likely emptiness. He has come to despise the cheesecake slices that are offered to him at every stop in accordance with his contract. He remembers a consequential early audition for Schneider, as well as a cringeworthy therapy session in the company of his daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough). These flashbacks are artfully stitched into the story. “I’m suddenly remembering things I haven’t thought about in a long time,” Jay says. “It’s like a movie where I’m playing myself.” Meanwhile, he stows himself in a bathroom where he repeats his name alongside other stars, like Clark Gable and Cary Grant — as though he wishes he would be as important as they, but fears he is merely as unreal. “We’re in second-class on a French train to nowhere, taking care of an infant,” Liz says, not incorrectly, before decamping.
If this all sounds too meditative, Baumbach packs the journey with incident. Aboard the train, there is an all-time awkward meeting between Jay and Daisy, who is accompanied by her pretentious French boyfriend. Later, when a thief makes off with a passenger’s purse, Jay instinctively shifts to movie-star mode by chasing and then tussling with the seeming criminal. A crowd gathers to cheer the hero, but it turns out to be a hollow victory when the thief is revealed as no action-movie heavy but merely a mentally unwell man, flesh and blood, like Jay. Bit by bit, Baumbach knocks the scales from the eyes of these Hollywood people. “I’m sorry, but I’m just jet-lagged, and I’m tired, and I’m old,” Ron says to a dissatisfied client, but he could be speaking for virtually everyone in the cast: Jay and all who follow and depend upon him.
As the film unfolds, though, it becomes clear that Jay is wending his way to another father figure besides Schneider — this one, his real father (Stacy Keach, appropriately sturdy even in his state of enfeeblement). “My son, the movie star,” says Dad, a retired John Deere “working stiff,” upon meeting up with Jay, who has sought his father’s presence at his tribute. “Action movies are bullshit — it’s all fake,” Dad insists, and Jay’s growth can be measured in his restraint in replying to such a slight. “You all can make up stories, but you and I know who I am,” Jay tells Ron. Of course, Ron is a nice guy in the Sandler mode of Punch-Drunk Love, but Jay?
The film concludes with Jay being washed over with film clips from his career at the tribute — in fact, actual clips from various Clooney epics of greater or lesser quality: Up in the Air and Burn After Reading, The Thin Red Line, and, heaven help us, The Peacemaker. Does the star/protagonist appear overcome because he knows how empty it is to lead a life on screen, or because he finally recognizes it is the best he can manage? It all sounds so meta, but in remembering Bogdanovich warmly and in showing us Clooney plainly, Baumbach makes us feel real emotions for people who too often seem chimeric. It’s OK: tear up for the failed director and the hopeless movie star.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
