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.     

Little Women

Director Greta Gerwig

Louisa May Alcott, 1850

LITTLE WOMEN                  B        

USA  (134 mi)  2019  d:  Greta Gerwig

Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.

―Little Women, 1868, opening line, written by Louisa May Alcott when she was 36

After the highly acclaimed Lady Bird (2017), an autobiographical accounting of her own childhood experience, Gerwig’s next film is an idyllic portrayal of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women, revealing a family of New England sisters held together by their mother while the patriarchal figure of their father is away from home for a prolonged period of time fighting in the Civil War.  Told out of time, cris-crossing between past and present, the film is a dizzying representation of childhood innocence, each sister pursuing their own dreams, living in a largely imaginary world where early on, at least, happiness comes easy because they have each other.  With the family representing a utopian alliance of like-minded ideals, the girls represent a spirit of community and kinship, including hopes and dreams of the future, each free to live as they please, each supportive of the other, unaware of the hardships that await them all, as the world in the mid 1860’s had not yet embraced women as full-fledged human beings yet, unable to vote or participate in the democratic process, or make a living on their own with a capacity to support themselves, instead their fates were subject to the patriarchal rule of men who decided everything for them.  Women were viewed as second-class citizens, not primary wage earners, largely condemned to poverty, so their place was in the home, expected to be mothers and child-bearers whose devotional love captured the heart and spirit of family, remaining docile, morally virtuous, responsible for the emotional care of children, but they were never viewed as qualified to make the household decisions.  Nonetheless, as young girls, they were each other’s best friends, rebelliously playing pirate games or inventing stories, even putting on various theatrical skits, where destiny at the time drew them closer together, continuously laughing and playing, inhabiting the same space with each other.  Men of the era repressed all emotions in favor of rationality, leaving women free to explore matters of the heart, including passions and emotions, inhabiting a different emotional sphere than men.  Accordingly, very few books were written specifically for women, which makes this work historically significant, opening new ground, exploring girlhood with a meticulous eye for detail, sharing common experiences that other girls could relate to, perhaps for the very first time.  The title itself is a bit ironic, as a male-dominated society kept women from realizing larger ambitions, seemingly content in their smaller roles, out of sight, largely hidden from view, yet the novel reveals contradictions of feminist explorations colliding against patriarchal repression in an intersection between patience, perseverance, moral indignation, self-sufficiency, and outright creativity.  A companion to Jane Eyre or the Brontë sisters, female chroniclers of a Victorian Age in England, yet there was no equivalent in America at the time, with Alcott challenging American puritanical social norms regarding gender by encouraging her young female readers to question unrealistic notions of romance and embrace their own freedom and independence.   

Gorgeously shot by Yorick La Saux in actual locations in and around Concord, Massachusetts, becoming a vibrant showcase for period costumes, also accentuating the pastoral beauty of autumnal colors.  In tone, the film is reminiscent of Judy Garland in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944), though Garland’s electrifying performance transcends anything seen here, where family is an essential ingredient to the American story, with women carrying the brunt of responsibility in looking after other siblings, like a second mother, while attempting to navigate their own developing social lives, including elegant gowns and ballroom dances as well as first romances, where the changing times of the turn of the century becomes a metaphor for a tumultuous coming-of-age journey to young adulthood.  Similarly, Alcott’s novel (adapted to film for the 8th time) is a captivating glimpse of adolescence focused on sisterly love and domestic tranquility, which similarly follows the young girls’ journey into marriage and young adulthood, largely documented by the writings of Jo March (Saoirse Roman), the most compelling figure in the novel, completely unpredictable and one of the most enduringly popular girlhood literary characters, a boyish tomboy with a Huck Finn sense of adventure and curiosity who blurs the gender boundaries by exclaiming, “It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy’s games, and work, and manners.  I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.”  Jo’s individualism allows other girls to dream beyond the confines of family restriction and explore the possibility of autonomy, remaining ambiguous throughout in her sexual leanings, seen at the outset visiting a publishing house, thrilled to actually receive compensation for one of her short stories, elatedly running down the street afterwards in a euphoric mood, with Jo representing the alter-ego mindset of the author.  The Marches are a microcosm of women in society, including Meg (Emma Watson), the oldest, prim and proper, an actress at heart, easily the most pragmatic, who yearns to marry and have children of her own, Beth (Eliza Scanlen), perhaps the most generous, a lover of music, spending her time at the piano, always kind to others, yet timid and shy, having a weak heart, and Amy (Florence Pugh), the youngest and most spoiled, an overt social climber, refusing to be poor, a lover of beauty and painting, struggling with her own jealousy and self-centered pettiness, yet strong-willed, showing an abrasive tongue, eventually learning to embody the rigid feminine ideal, while their mother (Laura Dern) is the picture of self-sacrifice, utterly devoted to her girls, but sympathetic to others in need, demonstrated by one Christmas morning when she convinces her girls to give their massive breakfast to a destitute immigrant family living nearby, in the process showing them what dire poverty really means, but their exemplary behavior comes from the selfless example set by their mother, whose husband is off fighting in the Civil War.  One recurring picture of the family is sitting around their mother next to the fireplace as she reads letters received from her husband, each one hanging on every word.  This sense of closeness is evident throughout, living a cloistered existence outside the reach of boys and men, where their playful chatter and overlapping dialogue is a picture of domestic bliss, each independently headstrong in their own way, each perfectly capable of expressing their own ideas. 

The novel was initially released in two volumes in 1868 and 1869 (the first printing selling out in two weeks!), one portraying their childhood and another set a few years later following them into married life, eventually combined into one novel, revealing the painfully limited choices for women, challenging the notion that marriage is the ultimate woman’s fulfillment, instead capturing a ferocious spirit of yearning to do big things, to make a difference in the world.  The March patriarchal father (Bob Odenkirk) eventually returns home from the War and people get on with their lives, but at the center, Jo’s unique confidence in herself allows her to subvert the necessity of marriage (a woman’s only means of economic advancement at the time), an idea that prevails throughout both the novel and the film, becoming so successful at it that her rich Aunt March (Meryl Streep), who never married herself but somehow obtained wealth, considers Jo a lost cause.  Nonetheless, she has a male companion that’s been in love with her since they first met, Laurie, Timothée Chalamet, the teenage heartthrob from Call Me By Your Name (2017), who has lived most of his life in Europe but moves in with his grandfather, the kindly neighbor Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper) after the death of his mother, running into Jo at a ballroom dance she’s actually avoiding, expressing little interest in boys or the ritualistic elegance, yet they immediately hit it off, disdaining all stuffy traditions, dancing unseen on the outdoor porch, actually having fun until Meg, the belle of the ball, turns her ankle, with Laurie insisting on escorting them both safely home, suddenly whisked into the March family home, finding a bevy of beautiful girls, which for a boy in his position is like finding a goldmine.  But he has a competitor, someone Jo meets while working as a governess at a boarding house in New York, finding Professor Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel) tutoring his nephews.  A man of intellect and strong principles, she quickly rejects him when he is overly critical of her writing, all but dismissing his point of view.  But as the years pass and her sisters get on with their lives, her pig-headed stubbornness alienates her from humanity, decisively rejecting Laurie’s marital request, leaving her lonelier than ever, which allows her to write, but at a painful cost.  This trait she shares with other great writers, as they can’t stop to enjoy their lives as they’re too busy writing about it with meticulous detail, spending their days and nights locked away in empty rooms, with Jo often seen writing by candlelight.  There is a frustrating, tacked-on ending that feels like a betrayal, more what readers and viewers might want, turning it into a sentimentalized compromise ending that seems at odds with Jo’s independent streak and philosophical outlook, revealing a commercialized expectation, but hardly the view of the artist herself.  Louisa May Alcott never married, and never thought much of her famous novel, which she described as “moral pap,” becoming an overnight literary star, rejecting all the celebrity acclaim that comes with success, very much like Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, both preferring to live quiet lives of anonymity.