Throughout his illustrious career, George Clooney has played the role of a casino thief, a batman,A chain-gang criminal, a murderer and a high-flying artist. This fall, he’s playing an even more charming and gorgeous movie star. Just kidding!
Reality and fantasy weave in and out beautifully in “Jay Kelly,” director Noah Baumbach’s love letter to Hollywood, which, on the other hand, could so easily have just been a love letter to Clooney.
The screenplay by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer finds Clooney — sorry, Jay Kelly — in a kind of midlife funk. He’s 60, a universally beloved, fiercely honest film actor who has worked his way to the top and, well, found finesse.
“My life doesn’t really seem real,” he says at one point, referring to an actor who is trained in doing drama and an actor who is trained in doing drama. In another scene he thinks: “All my memories are movies.”
A chance encounter with an old acting partner – a brilliant Billy Crudup, whose character Kelly had betrayed years earlier – uncovers some unpleasant truths. “Is there a person out there? Maybe you don’t really exist,” he asks Starr, sending Kelly on a journey of self-discovery that just so happens to be. Clooney’s favorite places, Italy.
Kelly’s careful facade – the stories he tells about himself – soon falls away. Heading for the Hollywood hills, he apparently left some personal carnage behind. “Jay Kelly” is about the people who made sacrifices to get to where he is.
Adam Sandler and Laura Dern play Kelly’s long-suffering manager and publicist, respectively, while her angry adult daughters are played by Grace Edwards and Riley Keough. Kelly, we learn, puts career first and that means stepping away from things like her daughters’ schooling and letting her employees miss things like their daughters’ schooling. “He’s not our family or our friends,” Dern’s character screams in frustration. “We are not to him what he is to us.”
You’d hope Clooney wouldn’t have to shift out of second gear for this, but he gives a soulful performance, so charming that his Kelly charms strangers trained in Italy with his amazing charisma and yet bristles when his eldest daughter forces him to confront his abandonment issues.
“Do you know how I knew you didn’t want to spend time with me?” her daughter asks her, before replying in a line that would come as a severe blow to any parent: “Because you didn’t spend time with me.” Another killer: “I wish you were the man I thought you were.”
This being a movie about a movie star, Baumbach and Mortimer naturally surround their protagonist in nods to classic film, from Alfred Hitchcock to Federico Fellini, whose scenes become a touchstone, like watching a priest licking two ice cream cones. Jokes are made about the Method school of acting and being a Dior ambassador, but it’s ultimately about mortality and life choices, with one scene actually ending in a graveyard, a little too on the nose.
Kelly becomes nostalgic as she watches her old breakout drama audition and her children’s happy domestic fun. It reaches into the misty forest in search of the real thing and, of course, finds salvation in a movie theater. Retrospective montages using actual Clooney roles such as “Combat Academy” and “Up in the Air” further blur the line between fact and fiction.
Clooney puts his ego on hold here, even mocking his heroic spirit when he chases a purse snatcher across a field, which echoes his action roles. That too proves to be inferior to bravery. There a strange spirit emerges in Jay Gatsby’s own world, hinted at by his first name and the name of one of his daughters, Daisy.
We see his cluelessness up close when he doesn’t really listen to his assistants or mindlessly throws away a gift of neckerchief from a dead colleague’s son. He reveals his arrogance when he tries to hide his age by drawing black Sharpie on his eyebrows.
Could the film have taken more of a dig at the self-involved stars we often worship? Absolutely. But what makes it powerful isn’t Hollywood drama. This is a film for any of us who has ever missed a child’s school presentation, asked an assistant to work late or skipped a family dinner because a client ran behind. It’s about time. It’s about where we choose to spend our time. First stop: “Jay Kelly.”
“Jay Kelly,” the Netflix release now in theaters beginning Dec. 5, is rated R for language by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 131 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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