Jay Kelly

 

Director Noah Baumbach

Baumbach on the set with George Clooney

Clooney with Adam Sandler

Crudup, Dern, Baumbach, and Sandler

The boys, Baumbach, Sandler, and Clooney

JAY KELLY              C+                                                                                                               USA  Great Britain  Italy  (132 mi)  2025  d: Noah Baumbach   

All my memories are movies.                                                                                                           —Jay Kelly (George Clooney)

A somewhat disjointed, emotionally disconnected attempt to do a Felliniesque 8 ½ (1963) existential reassessment of one’s life and career, elevating 60-ish actor George Clooney to the Marcello Mastroianni role, where a whirlwind of behind-the-scenes showbiz personalities are suddenly thrust centerstage, and the surrounding chaos of celebrity entourages suddenly become the focus of the film.  Written with Clooney in mind by Baumbach and British actress Emily Mortimer, both also making brief screen appearances, where only a real movie star would get the underlying nuances of this role, re-examining familiar Baumbach themes of family, separation, resentment, and personal reckoning, the question remains whether anything of real value arises from this trail of missed opportunities and perplexing existential confusion in this overlong film, lacking the subversive edge of his earlier work.  Is George Clooney working with Noah Baumbach a match made in heaven?  Jettisoning a movie career from his success as a handsome leading man in television, Clooney’s best work remains Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998), which features early performances in the budding careers of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, not yet stars, yet both sizzling onscreen, followed by David O. Russell’s THREE KINGS (1999), the Coen Brother’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), BURN AFTER READING (2008), and Hail, Caesar! (2016), Soderbergh’s OCEANS ELEVEN (2001), Stephen Gaghan’s SYRIANA (2005), Tony Gilroy’s MICHAEL CLAYTON (2007), Jason Reitman’s UP IN THE AIR (2009), Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), Clooney’s own GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (2005), The Ides of March (2011), and The Monuments Men (2014), Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity – 3D (2013), and Jodie Foster’s Money Monster (2016), where there are ups and downs, but he remains one of the familiar faces of Hollywood.  As for Baumbach, these are not exactly the snarky intelligent kids or anxiety-ridden young adults that comprise so much of his early work in Kicking and Screaming (1995), The Squid and the Whale (2005), Margot at the Wedding (2007), Greenberg (2010), Frances Ha (2012), While We're Young (2014), The Meyerwitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017), and Marriage Story (2019).  What this film brings is plenty of Hollywood money from Netflix, feeling excessive and over-bloated, yet that’s the point, featuring an A-list cast that is to die for, and while essentially cut from the same cloth, this breezy effort doesn’t hold a candle to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) (1957), Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), or Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories  (1980), lacking the brutal autobiographical honesty those films bring.  Strangely opening with a quote from Sylvia Plath, a highbrow American poet whose career abruptly ended all too soon, it eloquently provides the framework for the film, “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself.  It’s much easier to be someone else or nobody at all.”  The lush orchestration by Nicholas Britell is cheesy and overly melodramatic, literally pounding us over the head, though the piano score is more in balance with the brief moments of introspection, while the 35mm cinematography by Linus Sandgren, who has worked before with Damien Chazelle and David O. Russell, is always complimentary, yet this is a vacuous film with no lingering aftereffects, where what’s missing are the meticulously crafted human emotions in Baumbach’s other films, nominated three times for a Best Screenplay Oscar, feeling more like escapist, big budget entertainment, which is unlike anything else in his career of smaller yet boldly personal filmmaking.

What this film lacks, however, is Fellini’s visionary artistry, dark and surreal, creating a psychic kaleidoscope in which Mastroianni’s virtues and peccadilloes, fears and hopes, are quite literally paraded before our eyes, creating a character so dangerously complex that his image forever became emblematic of Fellini himself.  That doesn’t happen here, as no one associates George Clooney as a mirror image of Baumbach, instead Clooney plays himself and his own stardom in what may well be a career-defining performance, where the dreamlike flashbacks and other intrusions into his midlife crisis feel mildly entertaining, but hardly revelatory, seemingly overly shallow, with too many underdeveloped subplots.  In fact, this could be a candidate for the most insipid and least authentic film in Baumbach’s career, the most mainstream and conventionally old-fashioned, a thoroughly polished product and a hollow crowdpleaser, where it’s hard not to think this film is drastically out of step with the times by dealing with the problems of the super privileged.  While it’s not a disaster in the making, it just feels so frivolous and excessive, like the ravings of an overly selfish man, continually placing his career over family, irrespective of the emotional harm, and while he has second thoughts later in his life, his attempts at reconciliation come up short, as the damage has already been done, where his children really don’t want to be around him anymore, sickened by the emotional negligence he has inflicted into their lives, like a black hole.  It’s hard to feel sympathy for this man, yet he’s emblematic of the kind of powerful men now running the government, elitist billionaires placing career over family, or even the interests of the nation, where it’s all about money and power.  While this raises no real questions about the repercussions of politics or capitalism in our lives, it does expose the empty vacuum left as the price of success, where there’s obviously a trade-off, becoming fabulously wealthy as opposed to happy.  These aren’t the kinds of questions asked by ordinary citizens, where it’s hard to feel sympathy for the privileged super rich, as they have all the advantages.  While there is a chic and sophisticated cool in the way this is presented, it breaks no new ground, with Clooney as famous actor Jay Kelly basically doing a riff on himself and his own publicly acclaimed persona, looking back with regret on certain events that shaped him and his career, examining his personal life and some of the choices he’s made, essentially re-examining the legacy he is leaving behind.  At one point he looks at himself in the mirror and compares himself with movie greats from the past, a very self-aware moment, yet he’s also completely oblivious to the emotional wreckage he leaves in his wake, though he couldn’t have done it without Adam Sandler as his agent Ron Sukenick coming along for the ride, a sidekick who’s always there for him through thick and thin, dropping everything at a moment’s notice, continually assisting him any way he can while sacrificing his own family’s well-being, and in the process places his own personal life in constant turmoil, often turning this into a darkly comical buddy movie, yet the question remains whether this is a vanity project or whether this actually holds any lasting artistic value.  You might think it would matter that so many in the cast are celebrity offspring (Clooney, Laura Dern, Riley Keough, and Stacy Keach) or married to fellow artists (Mortimer, Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, and Patrick Wilson), gaining personal insight through their own life experiences, and while it may help with the minute personal details of their roles, this is no romanticized ode to Hollywood, more of a cautionary tale about what we sacrifice for success.

There are self-reflective similarities between this film and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi) (2025), both exploring the dysfunctional relationship between a man and his two adult daughters, who he mostly ignored to focus on his career, while also exploring the delicate balance between art and identity, but Trier handles the familial relationships with so much more complexity and depth, showcasing a poetic eloquence with richly-layered filmmaking.  Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, this is a movie built around the making of movies, as we see the daily anxieties and the juggled priorities, though it opens with a dizzyingly immersive film set, as the camera glides around in a long, single take with overlapping dialogue, reminiscent of Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), catching all the various personalities in shadowed silhouettes, producers, managers, camera operators and assistants, yet at the center of this orchestrated chaos is Jay Kelly (Clooney) lying on the ground with a gunshot wound, offering a near-death monologue that wraps up the film before asking the director whether he can go again, thinking he can add more to the scene, essentially opening the door for viewers to enter this highly exclusive world, with a myriad of voices heard offscreen.  “What do you say to people who say you only play yourself?”  It’s a question asked not only of actor Jay Kelly, but of Clooney himself, who’s been playing some version of himself since the beginning, incredibly handsome, suave and debonair, with a witty rapport, like a reincarnation of Cary Grant, one of only four men to have been voted “the sexiest man alive” twice by People magazine, the others being Richard Gere, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp.  Sandler showed a different side of himself in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002), turning compulsively out of control with a gambling addiction in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019), while here he straddles the line between having his own life and disappearing in the Jay Kelly universe, and is on the phone for nearly the entire film, usually talking to his wife Lois (Greta Gerwig) about the latest family emergency, where he’s emotionally exhausted, torn between two worlds, trying to hold his family together from afar.  But he’s a trusted male companion for Kelly, omnipresent, going wherever the actor goes, as does Laura Dern as his publicity agent Liz, following him around along with an everpresent bodyguard Silvano (Giovanni Zeqireya), hair and make-up artist Candy (Emily Mortimer), and even an intern.  While the man likes to complain that he’s always alone, someone is always by his side, where his every whim is catered to, but they’re simply invisible to him, as he takes them for granted.  “We’re not to him what he is to us,” Liz tells Ron.  Putting himself on a pedestal is the first order of business, where perhaps most especially his family become secondary figures in the life he’s chosen, like a solar planet with the moons and stars orbiting around him, where tuning them out seems necessary, at least to him, to maintain his own professional equilibrium, as he needs to be hyper-fixated on each successive role.  Despite this, he can be standoffish and emotionally inaccessible, keeping viewers, fans, family and friends at arm’s length, lacking the exploratory, character-driven nature of Baumbach’s previous films.  Maybe this reveals more about the destructive power of the industry itself than having anything to do with the actual world around us.  In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s showbiz movie ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), Bette Davis gives an infamous monologue while contemplating her own stardom, “The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster.  You forget you’ll need them again.” 

Much like Richard Linklater, Baumbach has built a career accentuating the complex interactions between characters, where his emotional authenticity established him as an important voice of independent cinema, yet there’s much less of that here, sacrificing the usual finesse, as characters routinely appear and disappear within the scenes, with few sticking around, outside of Ron, making it much more difficult to assess, as this never really delves deep enough to challenge the viewers.  Supposedly the most reflective performance in Clooney’s career, “the last of the classic movie stars,” he’s an actor facing his mortality while contemplating his personal and professional choices, feeling more like a road movie, told in a non-linear fashion, with extensive use of flashbacks, moving between his real self and his movie star façade.  Perhaps the most powerful scene in the entire film is a mix of the past and the present, meeting up with an old friend from his young actor studio days, as he runs into Billy Crudup as Timothy, sharing a drink in the present, rehashing old times, recalling that Timothy was the most talented actor in the class, someone who could make anything interesting, and to prove it, he has him read the menu, which turns out to be flabbergastingly good, taking us all by surprise, making so much out of so little.  For a few minutes of screen time, it’s simply phenomenal.  But their respective careers took off in opposite directions following a single audition, with a younger Timothy (Louis Partridge) nervously reading for the part, with a younger Kelly (Charlie Rowe) feeding him the lines, until the director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent, modeled on Peter Bogdanovich, who mentored Baumbach) decides to switch the roles and have Kelly audition for the part.  The scene plays out with Clooney in the present mode off to the side of the frame looking on at their younger selves, like stepping into a memory, a technique that was used by Robert Altman in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), a pivotal moment in their lives where he essentially stole the role from Timothy, who continues to hold a grudge to this day, angrily giving Kelly a black eye before the scene is over, happening offscreen, requiring the expertise of a make-up artist to smooth over the rough edges for his public image.  The real bone of contention is between his two kids, two daughters, Jessica (Riley Keough) and Daisy (Grace Edwards), with the completely estranged Jessica trying to pull him into her therapy session, amenable at first, but he quickly exits when he realizes it’s all about the mistakes he’s made, getting a little bit too real, while Daisy is traveling through Europe with friends before heading off to college in the fall, surprising her unannounced on the train one day, which is an unwelcome visit when she realizes he’s been stalking her through her credit card transactions, wanting nothing more to do with him.  Yet these are the two people whose approval he most wants in his life now that his career is slowing down, suddenly finding himself with time on his hands.  While he’s essentially en route to pick up a lifetime achievement award in Tuscany, watching tribute clips of his own films, which turn out to be Clooney’s movies in his own CINEMA PARADISO (1998) moment, continually thinking about his life along the way, his world splits apart at the seams, seemingly losing everyone he holds dear, where his view of himself comes under scrutiny, regretting he wasn’t there more for his children, where the wondrous flashbacks of the two giggling girls doing amateur outdoor theater as Kelly and Kelly in the back yard are simply adorable, but it’s a reminder of what he’s left behind, adding a tragic humanistic element to the price of fame.     

Me and Orson Welles

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set with Zac Efron and Richard McKay

Author Robert Kaplow

Arthur Anderson and Orson Welles in Julius Caesar, 1937

ME AND ORSON WELLES                        B+                                                                          USA  Great Britain  (114 mi)  2008  ‘Scope  d: Richard Linklater

“How the hell do I top this?”   —Orson Welles (Christian McKay)

Richard Linklater movies tend to have a modernist bent to them, where you can feel at times as if you’re lost in a minefield of existential drift.  But that is certainly not the case here in what amounts to a charming and thoroughly enjoyable piece of historical nostalgia, set in 1937 when Orson Welles was attempting to open his Mercury Theater production with a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a heavily cut, empty-staged yet daring, politically-charged stage adaptation set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, with Welles playing the part of Brutus.  Linklater is a sincere admirer of Welles, calling him the patron saint of independent filmmakers.  With wall-to-wall jazz music and a typewriter style opening title sequence, one would swear we are about to witness a Woody Allen movie, but we are soon introduced to a strange new world, all led by the larger-than-life persona of the young 22-year old Welles who has yet to make a single movie and is full of swagger and theatrical bluster.  The brilliant performance by British actor Christian McKay, an alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company who was discovered when he played Welles in a one-man play, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, on a small stage in London, just nails the all-too-perfect speech intonations and sardonic facial expressions of Welles, a young genius child prodigy who has yet to take the world by storm.  Alongside Richard Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s CAPOTE (2005), this is one of the great biographical film performances, though completely ignored by the Academy, where Welles’ blustery self-assurance and bullying sarcastic wit are on full display, obviously a man on a mission who is just getting his first taste of his own powers, literally browbeating his cast into submission, refusing to accept anyone else’s way except his own, quickly showing them the door if they refuse, so everyone defers to his judgment.  After all, he takes credit for every idea, even Shakespeare’s, calling it an Orson Welles production of Shakespeare, where he gets top billing, deleting characters and scenes on a whim whenever the mood suits him, but also making everyone feel that despite the fact they are receiving no salary, they are just a few days away from being a part of theater history. 

Interesting that this is the very first Shakespeare performance on Broadway, ever, where Welles is like a traveling road show that rolls in and out of town, driven by the breeze of destiny, yet the “Me” of the title concerns a small bit player, a coming-of-age 17-year old New Jersey high school student Richard (teen idol Zac Efron, working outside his comfort zone), who dreams of becoming an actor, skipping school, wandering downtown, and happening by chance to see Welles on the street in front of the theater, playing up to his enormous ego, all lies and pretense, but he wins a role as the charming, lute-strumming (it’s actually a ukulele) Lucius in the modern-dress revival of the play which is opening in a week.  Adapted by a husband and wife team of Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr. based upon a New York Times best-selling, meticulously researched historical novel by Robert Kaplow, a writer and New Jersey high school English teacher who was inspired by an archival photograph of a young 15-year old actor (Arthur Anderson) strumming the lute next to Welles onstage, imagining just what he must have been thinking at the time.  Linklater cleverly mixes fact and fiction in this portrait of the artist as a young man, as the film is limited to this memorable week of rehearsals, providing a window into the world of theater, showing the passionate camaraderie of those weary participants, very attentive to period detail, revealing behind-the-scenes vignettes of the principal players, but especially Welles who dominates every scene, as even when the cast sits around doing nothing, “We’re waiting for Orson,” his aura remains evident at all times.  To learn his part, Richard is referred to Sonja (Claire Danes), the all-purpose, exceedingly ambitious personal assistant who is likely already sleeping with Welles (along with pretty much every other female), who has promised her a chance to meet David O. Selznick and an opportunity to play in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939).  Discovering her last name is Jones, Richard serenades her with a line from Rodgers and Hart, Have You Met Miss Jones?, which might actually have spawned the director’s later interest in making Blue Moon (2025). Thoroughly flirtatious, leading to grownup sex, the two become fast friends, which they remain throughout the film, though she trusts Richard simply because he has no clout, so she can be open and honest with him, guiding him through the egos and everyday disasters that take place each day on the set. 

Recalling the immersive nature of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS (2000), with an observant young teenage reporter surrounded by a brave new world of rock ‘n’ roll, Efron is not very good in the play, but that hardly matters, as he’s playing a young novice who’s not supposed to be very good, so he fits comfortably into the production, enthralled by the world around him, which features excellent performances all around.  In perhaps the film’s best scene, Welles whisks “the kid” into a cab with him on route to the radio studio where he observes Welles perform a skit on a live radio broadcast, but along the way Welles drops his guard and reads him a passage from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, where he mourns that “Ambersons is about how everything gets taken away from you,” a stunning personal admission considering the Hollywood brass did exactly that to his career just a few short years later, destroying his original ending on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and effectively ending his Hollywood career.  When Welles ad-libs an Ambersons passage on the radio, adding a delicious soliloquy for himself, he’s profoundly seeing his career years ahead of himself.  Outside of Welles, James Tupper is absolutely brilliant as the suave and ever cordial James Cotton, the man behind the scenes of so many of Welles’ successes, Ben Chaplin plays an anxiety-ridden leading man George Coulouris, quickly whisking his mistress offstage when his wife arrives, Eddie Marsan plays the constantly perplexed theater manager and old friend, John Houseman, while Zoe Kazan (Elia Kazan’s granddaughter) plays Gretta, an aspiring young writer Richard befriends, helping her get published in The New Yorker.   While Richard is quickly informed by Sonja of his status, “You’re not getting anything except the opportunity to be sprayed by Orson’s spit,” Orson has a habit of initially bolstering each actor’s confidence with flowery praise, such as seeing “images of magnificence” in their eyes before bringing them back down to earth with his rapid fire rounds of terse criticism.  Thankfully, Linklater does show various scenes from the theatrical premiere, all of which feel like a special treat, so the audience is rewarded and never for a moment feels cheated in this film.   

While the film was a box office bomb, premiering in Toronto after select footage was screened at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and not released in the U.S. until a year later, this is something completely different for Linklater, yet it’s essential filmmaking, upbeat and thoroughly enjoyable, like a light at the end of the tunnel following the dark times of the Depression, beautifully extolling the glories and virtues of still being young, filled with idealistic hope and promise, with the film suggesting, “it’s all ahead of us.”  Offering an ambitious, behind-the-scenes glimpse of a theater production in the making, this spirited film always feels balanced, intelligent and amusing, filled with an unbridled wit and humor, along with a select few poor souls who unfortunately feel the ignominious wrath of an undeterred mad hatter in charge, yet the focus doesn’t always swirl around Orson Welles, the man who commands the salacious interest in every scene, where it’s hard to take your eyes off such a brilliant rendering of his overwhelming personality.  Instead, the week’s events are seen and filtered through the somewhat bland eyes (think Tab Hunter) of the young thespian who’s still taking classes in high school (actually found sleeping in class, due to his late night carousing), an idealistic, wide-eyed everyman character, just a few years younger than Welles himself, who instantly falls in love with Sonja, and whose life is forever altered by this experience.  Beautifully shot in London, New York, and the Isle of Man by Mike Leigh’s superb cinematographer Dick Pope, the film benefits from some plot twists, capturing the essence of Welles as a rising star and the beginning of the Welles legend, exhaustively researched, with a very beautiful reconstruction of the post-depression era of the 1930’s, a period where art and culture merged together.  Perhaps not up to the caliber of Cassavetes’ brilliant Opening Night (1977), or Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), both the ultimate masterworks in revealing the wrenching behind-the-scenes activities of a stage production, or even Desplechin’s delightfully offbeat ESTHER KAHN (2000), this film is nonetheless fueled by the supercharged performance of a young, unheralded actor who perfectly captures the indomitable spirit of Orson Welles, a legendary, larger-than-life figure who is one of America’s greatest and most controversial artists.