Noah Baumbach’s newest motion picture opens with a death scene … one that is being filmed for a movie with a backdrop of the Queensboro Bridge cast in miniature and built to scale. That movie’s main character is being played by Jay Kelly, who is, in turn, being played by George Clooney. Kelly dominates the foreground. Given the blocking, he looms larger than an electric billboard that is reflecting off the East River. Jay Kelly has been shot, and he is leaning back against a lamppost. His pulse is fading. A moment of silence, and then somebody yells “Cut!” after which Kelly bounces back with a renewed determination. “Can we go again?” he asks. It’s an existential question, one that we will return to in short order. For now what you need to know is that Jay Kelly is an icon, forged in the tradition of Cary Grant and Gary Cooper. Kelly is 64, and when we meet him, he is beginning to question whether the past 40 years of his life have been one long—and ultimately self-serving—performance, an attempt to bury Jay Kelly the man beneath a highly cultivated persona.
Baumbach’s motion picture functions like a house of mirrors, a case of art reflecting life reflecting art reflecting everything else. There are shades of Woody Allen in Jay Kelly, particularly Stardust Memories (1980). And there are shades of Fellini, particularly 8 ½ (1963). There’s even a bit of Defending Your Life (1991) swimming around in this movie, although Baumbach’s film seems a lot more consumed with the tradeoffs one accepts in return for putting him- or herself first. For Kelly, those tradeoffs included an estranged daughter, a number of lapsed friendships, and at least two divorces, all of which is heady material for a comedic drama, and there are moments when that muddies the waters. Is Jay Kelly dead? He might be. The audience is certainly given indications that Jay Kelly may have shuffled off this mortal coil. In fact, the movie’s color grading is so lush that it seems to be suggesting something otherworldly. On top of which, Kelly has been experiencing a lot of flashbacks, out-of-body windows into the events of his past. A third of the way into the movie, Jay Kelly is beginning to rediscover a few of the subtle joys that he has been deprived of ever since achieving stardom. He is also beginning to reconnect, to revel in the company of others. And this is where Baumbach’s picture is at its most poignant. It captures that feeling of setting out around twilight, of arriving at a confluence where the days crawl, even as the years fly by. The love you take is equal to the love you make, and all of that. Jay Kelly is a cautionary tale about the things that we pretend to be, and how those things may come to define us when it’s over. It’s also about allowing life to make its way back to us, assuming we can adjust not only to our own shortcomings, but to the traumas that were handed down to us when we were children.
People tend to be more intentional as they grow older. We become who and what we spend our days indulging. Storytelling and moviemaking, these can be as enriching (and reciprocal) as any relationship that is worth preserving. But what of the artist who has become an extension of his industry, a circumstance that brings us back to the underlying conceit of Baumbach’s movie: Who is the authentic self, really? Are we a representation of our values, or are we just vessels, playing out our day-to-day based on momentum and order? Baumbach seems to be suggesting that the answer is largely a matter for the beholder. In fact, one might argue that Jay Kelly is to the three-quarter-life crisis what Frances Ha (2013) was to the quarter-life crisis. Sure, one is intimate, whereas the other is expansive, but the two of them function like essential chapters in a book of years, a director’s way of reinterpreting rites of passage through a more objective filter.
A word now—before we wind down this review—regarding George Clooney and his status as a leading man. During a panel discussion following Jay Kelly’s American premiere at the New York Film Festival this past September, Baumbach revealed that when he originally gave Clooney the script for this project, the actor joked that there were “only about three people on Earth who could play [that] part.” And Clooney was correct, although he had neglected to add that there wasn’t any other person on Earth who could have inhabited Jay Kelly with quite the same panache. George Clooney is debonair, yes, but he is also disarming in a way that the majority of Hollywood’s leading men are not. Clooney has the ability to put an audience at ease, or to warm them … to make the heavy things seem light. To that end, a lot of the most memorable scenes in Jay Kelly are a result of Clooney either interacting with only one other character or conveying an emotion by himself. Every time a sequence calls for anything more elaborate—like, say, a tracking shot—the illusion begins to crumble, and the delivery feels rushed. But this is small potatoes, and it in no way distracts from the fact that Jay Kelly has such a tremendous amount of wisdom to impart. The cast is brimming with Baumbach’s go-to players: Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, and Greta Gerwig (to name a few). The metaphor works on multiple levels, and all the pieces fit because Baumbach has become a master of the character-driven narrative. All of his memories are movies. And all of his movies represent some attempt at documenting a deeply personal point of view.
Jay Kelly arrives in theaters nationwide this Friday, November 14th, and it will be available for streaming on Netflix as of December 5th.
