Director: Noah Baumbach
Stars: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Grace Edwards
Noah Baumbach’s last Netflix film – the scatologically apocalyptic White Noise – was not well loved, but I dug the attempt from Baumbach to change up. It was weird, itchy and agitated (complimentary). His latest, co-written with Emily Mortimer who also has a small part, mostly turns away from these affectations for something incredibly safe and, ultimately, cliché. There’s a notion that all filmmakers end up making a movie about filmmaking. Well, here’s Baumbach’s addition to that overstuffed, self-congratulatory canon, even if his attempt deflects the spotlight toward one of Hollywood’s most affable leading men, George Clooney.
Clooney’s always been more of a movie star than an actor, even though his roles and performances have often played on his innate charm and baring. He’s an immensely talented and likeable performer. Jay Kelly openly lionises these qualities of Clooney (distractingly so at its end), but in doing so it risks asking us to believe that Clooney is his titular alter ego, and if so it’s not a particularly handsome self-portrait.
Kelly is a wealthy Hollywood actor of a certain vintage facing a crisis of identity that plays out over the course of a few days that cross continents. Amorphously dissatisfied with his career and running from an altercation with an old friend (Billy Crudup) that’s left him with a black eye and the ticking time bomb of a tabloid exposé, Kelly chases his independent college-age daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) to Europe in a move that belies a wealth of ulterior motives.
Wherever Kelly goes, so goes an entourage that includes best friend and manager Ron (Adam Sandler), who organises a tribute to Kelly in Italy. Indeed, Ron seems to have dedicated his life to a job that mostly entails fanning his buddy’s ego and fetching him water. Still, their 30+ year partnership has developed its own tensions, not least because Kelly fails to see Ron’s entire other life as a father and husband; a life that Ron is frequently kept from.
The portrait painted is an over-familiar one; that of a pampered white man who has shrugged off emotional commitments in pursuit of his own celebrity mythos. Baumbach and Mortimer’s script vocalises his egocentric neuroses throughout the course of the running time. Kelly hears second hand that his (mostly) estranged daughter Jessica (Riley Keough) has labelled him “an empty vessel”. He’s prone to statements like “life doesn’t feel real” and “all my memories are movies”, and the question is asked of him, “is there a person in there?”. Jay Kelly doesn’t want anyone missing the existential crisis at it’s centre, but mostly Kelly is painted as risibly vacant and self-centred. He even narrates his own flashbacks, a perplexing affectation that suggests a problem with articulating context to the audience.
Along the way the movie makes strained efforts to contrast Kelly’s Tinseltown-addled existence with that of us regular folk – the help are human too! – but these cute affectations mostly present as condescending caricatures. Laura Dern is mostly wasted as put-upon entourage member Liz (maybe a publicist?), who really seems only to exist to announce this theme before swiftly exiting the stage. Through her and others it feels as though Baumbach is pandering to a perceived need for representation, but it often plays as though he only has a vague notion of what a regular person is. A version learned, well, through the movies.
In the film’s arduous mid-section Kelly takes over an entire train car and basks in the glory of his own celebrity as a cross-section of European ‘types’ fawn over him. It’s a rather sickening exhibit of narcissism that does little to engender any sympathy, something already lacking because of how ill-timed Baumbach’s ode to the Rich White Man feels. Later on in the picture, a line of laboured dialogue acknowledging this does little to undo the engrained sentiment. Kelly’s crisis is entirely privileged, and most of the details that explain why others begrudge him are, honestly, well-founded.
Clooney is fine, trusting that we’ll take Jay Kelly with a pinch of salt. That it isn’t him but an idea of an actor. But the movie-capping tribute skews this assertion, feeling a little like the hagiographic ode to Tom Cruise that opened Final Reckoning. Clooney’s direct-to-camera address does little to rectify this eleventh hour fumble. It’s also unfortunately quite telling that the movie’s best scenes are the ones he isn’t in; a flashback to a time when Jay stole a part from a close friend which gives young actors Charlie Rowe and Louis Partridge a moment to shine, and a side-story in which Ron attempts to placate the needs of his other main client, Jay’s nominal rival Ben Alcock (Patrick Wilson). Ultimately, it’s Sandler who steals the show, actually.
All these familiar faces bring me to a personal bugbear about movies that ask us to believe in a made-up celebrity. If you’re going to do this successfully, surrounding them with other big name stars as supposed average joes creates a fundamental dissonance in the movie’s reality. One can’t help but notice that Kelly’s manager is also Adam Sandler; that his publicist (maybe) is also Laura Dern; that his daughter is Riley Keough; that his father is Stacy Keach. The central contract between the movie and the audience member is weakened by such distractions. Kelly’s celebrity is lessened. It’s all more of a struggle to buy into.
And Baumbach really needed that goodwill this time out. In the main (and even visually) Jay Kelly plays to the middle-of-the-road Woody Allen crowd, with sights on a similar level of mild humour, and typifying most scenes with characters exhaustingly talking over one another in an effort to be heard. It’s ultimately quite wearying for something this thin, that hinges itself on the hollow advantages of the rich and the privileged.
The Lost Highway Hotel 