Jay Kelly simply fades away before our eyes. It's a sweet and delicate film, but ultimately forgettable.
The weight of mortality weighs heavily on Noah Baumbach, and he channels it through a medium he claims to have fallen in love with again: CINEMA! With Jay Kelly, Baumbach examines the advantages and dangers of being a hugely successful movie star—a movie star with graying hair and a lonely life. The film opens in a studio where the main character, played by George Clooney, is finishing work on his new film. In the scene he's performing, he takes his last breaths while uttering these lines: "I don't want to be here anymore, Jerry.
Director: Noah Baumbach
Writers: Noah Baumbach, Emily Mortimer
Stars: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Stanley Townsend
I want to leave this party." Baumbach, through this opening scene, immediately announces what and how Jay Kelly will be. Jay will grapple with his fame, his identity, and his mortality, while Baumbach will work through his own feelings through his filmmaking. Jay, a man who struggles to connect with his two daughters and has unresolved issues with his father, finally confronts himself as he realizes that his work has made him part of a different family: that of film lovers. Because of this, Jay Kelly presents itself as one of those love letters to cinema, but this letter becomes obvious when Baumbach explicitly addresses the theme.
This means that the opening sequence inside a studio presents a pretty, dreamlike image of what filmmaking is like. The chaos, the stress, the madness of it all is sidestepped, or rather, shown as a seductive fantasy that resembles an outsider's view of what it's like to spend a day on set with all the people trying to meet the schedule.
Even the final scene, with shots from Jay's filmography projected onto a large screen, feels like a clichéd moment that whispers, "Hey, movies are magic." Baumbach's love letter, then, is only effective when he simply focuses on the film he's making. What those moments highlight is the director's exceptional ear for dialogue, which flows across the screen like music. Sometimes it overlaps, sometimes it hits the mark directly. When Ron (Adam Sandler), Jay's manager, tries to stop Liz (Laura Dern), Jay's publicist, from leaving, he reveals that he once planned to propose to her at the Eiffel Tower, and this confession opens the door to an alternate reality where we imagine what Liz and Ron's lives might have been like if things had been different. When Jay, on a train in Paris, tells Ron that he's remembering things he hadn't thought about in a long time, Ron begins to confide in him about his own family problems. Their words clash, but Jay's problems take precedence. In fact, Jay always wins. No situation, no relationship, no emergency can be as important as Jay's thoughts and feelings. It doesn't matter if Daisy (Grace Edwards), Jay's youngest daughter, wants to go on a trip with her friends instead of spending the week with the great Jay Kelly. Jay wants to be with his daughter, right? He'll follow her, like a stalker, and "accidentally" run into her during her trip.
Why doesn't Daisy want to spend quality time with her father? Why does even Jessica (Riley Keough), his eldest daughter, avoid him? Because Jay, as a young and successful superstar, was always busy, and he's still too self-absorbed to truly care about anyone else. He asks Daisy about her trip, but he doesn't really listen to her. He goes to a therapy session with Jessica and leaves as soon as he feels uncomfortable. With Jay, it's always about what he wants and how he feels. \
Any concern or interest he shows in others is essentially an act. For example, he asks Ron about a game, but interrupts him as soon as he starts talking. Ron, in a way, is similar to a potential Jay: he's also so absorbed in his work that he doesn't dedicate enough time to his own family. He calls Jay "puppy," although he apparently calls all his clients that.
Ron motivates Jay, flatters him, and considers him a friend. But Jay is also Ron's source of income. Can a genuine friendship exist when money is involved? Ron mentions that Jay attended his daughter's quinceañera, but Liz sharply reminds him that he wasn't at Daisy's graduation. "You weren't invited because this only works one way," she says, bursting Ron's bubble of fantasy. Online TV streaming services
Ron believes his job is to support a great artist, an artist who shares with other human beings what it means to be a human being. For Baumbach, a great artist like Jay is a thief. As a young man, Jay (Charlie Rowe), an aspiring actor, stole an idea from his best friend and roommate (Billy Crudup) and landed a role that set him on the path to fame and fortune.
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