{"id":29378,"date":"2025-08-28T20:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T20:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/29378\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T20:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T20:41:07","slug":"george-clooney-in-a-fun-but-soft-hollywood-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/29378\/","title":{"rendered":"George Clooney in a Fun but Soft Hollywood Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cJay Kelly<\/a>,\u201d George Clooney<\/a> plays a movie star very much like George Clooney. By that, I don\u2019t simply mean that the outlines of Clooney\u2019s career and that of the character sync up just so (though they do). As the movie is conceived, Jay Kelly, a popular and prestigious Hollywood actor for more than three decades, with an array of crowd-pleasing dramas, high-end action hits, and robust awards films behind him, is a character who has been constructed around the very DNA of George Clooney\u2019s personality. He\u2019s got that same brash feel-good charm, that effortless smooth quickness of mind, and more than that he\u2019s got that quality of finely honed grinning sincerity \u2014 the ability to talk to anyone and make them feel like he\u2019s really listening, that he\u2019s eager to connect, not because he\u2019s putting on an act but because that\u2019s just the way he is. At the same time, the film slyly encourages us to ask: How much of that very quality is an act?<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the opening scene, Jay is on set, wrapping up his latest movie, filming a death scene \u2014 the character has been gut-shot, but his loyal dog is there, and so, in the distance, is an oversize neon Pepsi-Cola sign. When Jay tells the director that he\u2019d like to do another take, we see that Jay hasn\u2019t lost his perfectionism, the devotion to getting it right that\u2019s part of what made him a star. (He\u2019s also hooked on second chances.) And we see that he\u2019s no prima donna; he has a way of making even his most domineering demands land lightly. Which is very Clooneyesque.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis entourage, however, might view it differently. Jay, away from the set, has a crew of royal handlers who surround him as they attempt to satisfy his every whim. There\u2019s his long-time manager, Ron (Adam Sandler<\/a>), his hard-bitten publicist, Liz (Laura Dern), and several other high-powered masochistic showbiz vassals. Working for Jay, we gather, is no picnic, and they\u2019ve all been at it a long time. Someone observes that Jay isn\u2019t 25 anymore. \u201cHe\u2019s not 55 anymore,\u201d comes the reply, which in movie-star terms puts him in the category called is-he-aging-like-fine-wine-or-just-aging-out? \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it\u2019s not until we see Jay with one of his two daughters, Daisy (Grace Edwards), who is about to go off to study biotech engineering at Johns Hopkins, that we glimpse the hidden side of him \u2014 the vulnerable side. He doesn\u2019t want her to go; it\u2019s going to leave him feeling alone. (Which makes us think: He must really be alone.) Jay\u2019s old British actor chum, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), has just died, and there\u2019s a lovely flashback to the two of them cooking dinner in Jay\u2019s palatial L.A. home, reminiscing about the movie they first did together \u2014 \u201cCranberry Street,\u201d which was 35 years ago. They call each other \u201cPop\u201d and \u201cFKFKFKF,\u201d like family. But in the flashback, Peter, whose career has faded, wants Jay to lend his name to a project he\u2019s working on, so that he can get back in the game. Jay won\u2019t do it. It\u2019s not the right career move for him, and the politics of his career always come first.<\/p>\n

\n\tDirected by Noah Baumbach<\/a>, from a script he co-wrote with the actor Emily Mortimer, \u201cJay Kelly\u201d is a fictional inside-the-movie-world portrait that\u2019s been made with a great deal of care and affection and entertaining dish, and it\u2019s the definition of a movie that goes down easy. Clooney, playing such a direct variation on himself, does an expert job of showing us celebrity from the inside out, deconstructing the very notion of stardom. And coming after \u201cWhite Noise,\u201d Baumbach\u2019s overly conceptual mash-note homage of a literary adaptation, \u201cJay Kelly\u201d returns this filmmaker to what he does best: an avid, dialogue-driven drama that seems ripped from personal observation. The last film Baumbach made in this mode, \u201cMarriage Story,\u201d was, I thought, a new peak for him \u2014 one of the greatest movies ever made about marriage, and about the collapse of a marriage. So I had hopes that \u201cJay Kelly\u201d would do for movie stardom what \u201cMarriage Story\u201d did for divorce.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut for all its enjoyable qualities, and its vivid details (like the way Jay colors the gray out of his eyebrows with a Sharpie), \u201cJay Kelly\u201d is movie that takes a \u201chard\u201d look at stardom yet has a soft center. As a character study, it wants to examine a celebrity who\u2019s soulful and charismatic enough to be played by George Clooney, and to reveal his hidden colder side. To that end, I\u2019d say it does\u2026and it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n\tJust as Jay is coming out of Peter\u2019s funeral, he runs into someone he hasn\u2019t seen for years: his old actor buddy Timothy (played by an unnervingly jittery-beneath-the-frozen-smile Billy Crudup), who creeps up to him in the parking lot. The two were members of the same Method Acting class, and Jay, trying to be the decent fellow he\u2019s branded himself as being (and maybe is), says that they should hang out some time \u2014 in fact, how about right now? They go for a drink, and are talking about the old days, when Timothy blurts out his confession: He despises Jay. And that\u2019s because Jay, he says, stole everything from him. It all happened on a day that\u2019s become part of Jay\u2019s legend, the one where he tagged along with Timothy on an audition and wound up landing the part himself. But Timothy regards what happened as a toxic betrayal.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis sounds like it has the intriguing makings of a murky and maybe ugly formative incident, one that will hover in the background like some ghostly metaphorical anecdote out of a Tennessee Williams drama. But then Baumbach does something surprising: He gives us a complete flashback to this primal event. We see the young Jay accompanying the young Timothy to his audition (it\u2019s for \u201cCranberry Street\u201d), we see Broadbent\u2019s Peter hovering on the couch, and we see Timothy flub the audition, badly. (He\u2019s trembling.) So Jay, who wasn\u2019t planning on doing this, asks if he can audition too. And he does.<\/p>\n

\n\tCall me an enabler of toxicity, but I watched this scene and saw absolutely nothing wrong with anything Jay did. We can certainly see how Timothy, after all these years, would still be pissed, but the scene, as presented, is not a betrayal, except in one sense: It betrays that Baumbach isn\u2019t going to let his movie-star hero undergo the kind of true reckoning that might have made him a great character. His peccadilloes are going to be user-friendly, and what\u2019s more they\u2019re going to be undercut by the Clooney persona.<\/p>\n

\n\tJay goes to visit his other daughter in San Diego, and Jessica, played with snappish righteousness by Riley Keough, more or less hates him. She insists that Jay accompany her to her therapist\u2019s office, where the therapist, a New Age charlatan, reads out loud the letter she wrote to Jay, accusing her father of abandoning her when she was growing up. It was after Jay and her mother split up (one of several divorces for Jay), and he simply wasn\u2019t there. He was away on his movie sets.<\/p>\n

\n\tOkay, that could happen. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9, and it\u2019s one we don\u2019t actually see being enacted (we\u2019re simply told that Jay was an absentee father), but it\u2019s eminently plausible; he even admits it. The trouble is that Clooney, while his Jay certainly treats his business handlers in an entitled fashion, plays almost every scene in such a warm and engaging way that in our moviegoing reptile brains we don\u2019t buy the idea that Jay, when he was around, was such a bad dad. It\u2019s a concept the film never completely brings to life. \u201cJay Kelly\u201d wants us to touch the flawed soul of Jay (it has him looking back over his life almost like Ebenezer Scrooge in \u201cA Christmas Carol\u201d), yet it\u2019s working so hard to make him likable that it winds up seeming a bit toothless in its condemnation.<\/p>\n

\n\tJay, after his shattering encounter with Timothy, decides to walk out on the movie he\u2019s supposed start shooting in a week and fly off to Europe instead, where he\u2019ll tag along with Daisy, the daughter who can still tolerate him, on her pre-academic jaunt from Paris to Italy. The heart of the movie is Jay on a road trip \u2014 a train trip, in fact \u2014 through Italy, ultimately leading him to a career tribute that\u2019s being given to him in Tuscany. (It\u2019s the sort of event he always turned down, because he didn\u2019t want to feel like it was gold-watch time.) On the train, Jay mingles with the mere Italian mortals (and is casually empathetic with them), and he even rescues an old lady\u2019s purse from a crazed German dude who\u2019s gone off his meds. The action flows, the badinage is fast and fun.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut as much as I enjoyed a lot of \u201cJay Kelly,\u201d on some level I didn\u2019t buy it. (That Jay\u2019s own loveless father, played by Stacy Keach, comes all the way to Tuscany for the tribute and then doesn\u2019t even stick around for it is\u2026too much.) Adam Sandler gives a sly, sheepish, beautifully mournful performance as Ron, the stubborn mensch of a manager who calls his clients \u201cpuppy,\u201d and who\u2019s juggling two of them: Jay, who he\u2019s been catering to for so long that it\u2019s starting to suffocate him, and the hack-actor-turned-TV-star Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson), who\u2019s devoted to his family. (He\u2019s the anti-Jay, schlepping his clan along for his own Tuscany tribute.) By the end, Ron is the only one left for Jay; that\u2019s how much Jay has alienated everyone. And then, at the tribute, there\u2019s a montage of Jay Kelly movie clips \u2014 and they\u2019re all clips from actual Clooney movies, showing just how close his career is to Jay\u2019s. With one exception: We never have to pretend that what we relish about George Clooney is only gray-coif-and-tan-skin-deep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cJay Kelly,\u201d George Clooney plays a movie star very much like George Clooney. By that, I don\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[23388,18,117,10232,19,17,23389,327,23390,11492],"class_list":{"0":"post-29378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-adam-sandler","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-george-clooney","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-jay-kelly","15":"tag-movies","16":"tag-noah-baumbach","17":"tag-venice-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}