“When I look at you, I see my whole life!”
This is what a stranger says to Jay Kelly (George Clooney) on a train in Italy. The man has never met Jay, but he still feels he knows him. Jay is a movie star, and movie stars are (or, at least they used to be) useful as a metric for the passage of time. This man associates different moments of his life with different Jay Kelly movies. Seeing the man in person is surreal, a flash of those moments all at once.
But if that’s what we see when we look at movie stars, it begs the question: what do they see when they look in the mirror? Jay Kelly sees the stars that came before him. He stares at himself, fitting his own name into the lineage of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Robert De Niro. He knows nothing about the inner lives of these men; nothing about their character, their relationships, their integrity. But that notoriety, that persona – that’s what he wants.
There’s a certain kind of movie about “the movies.” You know the type – movies that don’t equivocate on the harshness of the business itself, but come down on the side of it all being worth it. But “Jay Kelly,” directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, is not really one of those films. It’s a movie about regret, more of a desperate, death bed confession than a tribute to movie stardom. It’s not subtle by any means, but the pure anguish that runs under the surface of Baumbach’s latest work rings harsh and true by the film’s end. We’ve all considered the question of whether our lives have meaning or not. But most of us don’t have to live with the prospect of having the perceived sum total of our lives shoved in our faces day in and day out.
Jay Kelly is an aging movie star, settling into his tribute era – that time of an actor’s life where every film festival or awards body suddenly starts to honor their life’s work, as if all the best is already behind them. When an opportunity for a tribute in Tuscany comes about, Jay refuses, opting instead to shoot a new movie and spend the summer with his youngest daughter, Daisy (Grace Edwards). But Daisy already has plans to go to Europe with her friends, and doesn’t really feel like hanging out with her charmingly narcissistic father.
Up until reaching his tribute era, it seems Jay was fine, if a little uneasy, with this dynamic. But after the death of the director who gave him his big break and the reappearance of Tim (Billy Crudup), an old acting class acquaintance harboring a grudge, Jay accepts the tribute as an excuse to chase his youngest daughter across Europe, a last ditch effort to find some aspect of himself not tied to his fame.
In an early scene in “Jay Kelly,” a younger Jay (Charlie Rowe) reads a scene in an acting class, and his teacher remarks that Jay himself is more interesting than whatever character he’s attempting to step into – the mark of a movie star. Movie stars have to lie twice, the teacher says. Once when they’re playing a role, and again when they’re presenting their public facing self. As the big lie of Jay’s public life starts to come to an end, he doesn’t have a clue who this other version of himself is. Who is Jay the friend? Who is Jay the father? When you’ve given yourself away to the world, who are you left with when it all disappears?
In Jay Kelly’s case, he’s not left with much. Jay isn’t what you’d call a present father. Daisy seems content for him to hover in her periphery, and his eldest daughter, Jessica (Riley Keough) has already given up on any sort of relationship with him. The realest relationship Jay has is with his manager, Ron (a wonderful Adam Sandler), someone he pays to stick around. The most bittersweet, warmest moments in “Jay Kelly” unfold between Jay and Ron, particularly in one moment where Ron yells out in frustration, “I’m Jay Kelly, too!”
Ron has dedicated his life to the Jay Kelly experience as much as Jay has, knows him better and maybe even cares more about him than anyone else, despite the transactional nature of their relationship. Even when they’re arguing, Clooney plays Jay at his most relaxed around Ron, a sense of familiarity permeating their interactions with one another. In contrast, when he agrees to attend therapy with Jessica, he refuses to take it seriously. Jessica’s version of therapy comes across as silly, yes (Josh Hamilton plays a ridiculous guru). But it’s telling that Jay is willing to show more of whatever semblance of a man might be behind the mask to his manager than he is to his own daughter.
Clooney is an interesting comparison point for the type of celebrity that Jay Kelly seems to be. Clooney is someone who became famous in his mid-30s off the back of a hit television show before transitioning to movie stardom, and married and had children later in life. Jay Kelly seems more akin to someone like Paul Newman. In Jay’s acting classes, Tim (played by Louis Partridge in flashback) is often compared to Marlon Brando, someone who Newman notably felt inadequate to in comparison – although, who didn’t? Clooney also recently voiced Paul Newman in Ethan Hawke’s miniseries “The Last Movie Stars,” and it’s easy to imagine that some of that experience, particularly when it comes to Newman’s considerations of his own stardom and private life, might have bled over into Jay.
But it’s not just Newman. Jay is an amalgamation of an older generation of male movie stars. Men with extraordinary charisma and talent, but with a difficult relationship to themselves and their families. It’s why actors like family man Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson), Ron’s other client, piss Jay off. Ben seems to have figured out that coveted work-life balance that continues to elude Jay and men like him.
At the end of the day, Jay is nothing more than an empty vessel for the charisma and ambition that have defined his life. Clooney deftly taps into that hollowness. Except for a few key moments, Jay treats life like a movie. When he first meets up with Tim, he’s all warm chuckles and bittersweet nostalgia as he acts the benevolent star, talking up Tim’s talent as far better than his own. But, when Tim voices his resentments, Jay becomes confused – this isn’t how the movie is supposed to go. At one point, Jay chases down a pick pocket, heroically stopping a robbery and getting a woman’s purse back. But when the thief’s friend shows up, begging forgiveness for a man who forgot to take his medication, things become more murky. Once again, Jay seems befuddled. This isn’t how this was supposed to play out.
Jay lives his life like the cameras are on, unwilling or unable to confront who he might be when they turn off. When strangers look at Jay Kelly, they see their whole lives. When he looks at himself, all he wants do is ask for another take.