Adam Sandler and George Clooney in 'Jay Kelly'
How much empathy can you muster for someone who seemingly has it all? That question sits at the center of Noah Baumbach’s latest film Jay Kelly, another straight-to-Netflix offering in the director’s acid-tinged filmography.
Jay Kelly follows the titular movie star, played by George Clooney — a man seemingly born with a matinee-idol face and a mega-watt smile. Kelly slides through his picture-perfect life with heaps of movie-star charm, adoring fans, an overflowing bank account and his choice of A-list projects. But the death of his filmmaking mentor (Jim Broadbent), a chance encounter with a former acting friend (Billy Crudup, on his A-game) and the last summer before his daughter (relative newbie Grace Edwards) heads to college have Kelly rethinking just about every aspect of his ideal Hollywood life. Was his singular drive to succeed worth being absent for much of the childhood of his eldest daughter (Riley Keogh)? Is it possible to maintain some semblance of a normal, loving family life with a show-business job?
Some viewers will be allergic to a premise that threatens to veer off into navel-gazing, woe-is-me territory. But Baumbach, as he often does, steers the story into a melan-comic adventure as Kelly and his team (including Adam Sandler as Kelly’s longtime manager Ron and Laura Dern as his publicist Liz) galavant through the European countryside.
There is a sense of verisimilitude that Baumbach (himself married to actor and Oscar-nominated director Greta Gerwig, who appears in the movie as Ron’s wife) and co-writer Emily Mortimer (who is married to actor Alessandro Nivola and is the mother of actor Sam Nivola, and who also appears in the film) inject into the story. That’s not to mention the meta casting of Clooney and Sandler, two stars who have been known to put their family lives above career commitments. The Hollywood-averse may not care for all this, but it added layers of realism to the melancholy for me.
Jay Kelly’s release coincides with the 10th anniversary of Baumbach’s last traditionally theatrically released films — 2015’s very underrated screwball dramedy Mistress America and documentary De Palma. The director’s first of four outings with Netflix, 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories, was the jumping-off point for star Sandler’s second-career dive into a more challenging slate of roles. Jay Kelly adds to his list of legitimately prestigious roles. He and Clooney (reciting Baumbach dialogue for the first time since Fantastic Mr. Fox) have great chemistry; you believe they’ve known each other for a long time, and you can feel the sadness emanating from the pair when their longstanding work-friend relationship is called into question. Could it finally be time for the Sandman’s first Oscar nomination? I’m far from a Sandler acolyte, but the Academy owes him for the Uncut Gems snub.
By the time Jay Kelly shuffles toward its finale, I began to walk down the “is this navel-gazing?” path myself. But before things get too saccharine, Baumbach and Mortimer’s script delivers a brutalizing gut-punch of a final line. Is this the instant classic Marriage Story was? No, but Jay Kelly is a melancholic journey into a film star’s psyche. It fits snugly alongside some of Baumbach’s most acerbic works.
