Clooney and Baumbach flaunt Hollywood’s contempt for the public.
George Clooney’s shift from actor to political influencer demonstrated a celebrity’s contempt for the public. That’s the theme hidden in Jay Kelly, a biographical roman à clef by Noah Baumbach. Baumbach’s pretense that the starring role discloses Clooney’s heart and depth makes them the most disingenuous twosome in Hollyweird.
We’re spared political scrutiny from Baumbach, whose 2023 adaptation of Don DeLillo’s dystopic White Noise showed he had no personal sociological ideas. So this double-barreled vanity project replaces Clooney’s political activism with sycophantic fantasy authorized by the participation of the celebrity himself. (Imagine a critique of Clooney’s political skullduggery — promoting Biden’s Beverly Hills fundraiser last year, then abandoning Biden — a quintessential example of showbiz chicanery.)
Instead, the parallel syllables of Baumbach’s title expose a sham. Jay/George (or Kelly/Clooney) is a much sought-after father, son, and actor who is troubled. He escapes Hollywood obligations for a European trek to accept a contrived career-achievement award — an opportunity to pursue his two estranged daughters (one a feminist harpy, the other a gap-toothed sloth any TMZ celeb would actually disown).
Baumbach starts with an epigraph: “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” That’s from Sylvia Plath, whom Woody Allen already demolished in Annie Hall as an “interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.” Jay/George isn’t suicidal; his angst conflates Baumbach’s borrowing film-industry crisis from both Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels and Fellini’s 8½, although they are out of Baumbach’s league.
Clooney is mostly known for unctuous political statements, and a Paul Newman poster and 8-by-10 glossies of Loren, Mastroianni, and DeSica in Kelly’s dressing room only highlight his non-charisma. Clooney’s not a great, compelling actor like fellow crazed leftist comrades Robert De Niro and Sean Penn. After Clooney’s early popularity in Three Kings, The Perfect Storm, Out of Sight, The Peacekeeper, and his Coen-brother films (where he was always perfectly cast), he became completely fatuous. His self-satisfaction at the recent Golden Globes show revealed a man incapable of sincere expression. It makes Kelly’s confession — “I feel like my life doesn’t feel real” — laughable.
The key scene in this charade occurs between Clooney/Kelly and an ex-friend, a former actor turned child psychologist (played by the gifted Billy Crudup) whose demonstration of method acting outclasses Clooney’s entire career, making the film’s improbable premise impossible.
We might be ready for a film about the cost of political fame. And Baumbach might be cynical enough to track it. (He captures the accusatory lingo of Zoomers: “That’s a Nazi excuse!” and “You’re worse than Russia!”) But Baumbach’s cynicism about Hollywood’s parasites and exploitation dodges the issue. He knows bougie elitism but not life. Casting Adam Sandler as yet another sad sack — he plays Kelly’s groveling yet angry agent — lacks the moral insight of “Your loyalty is an accusation,” as said in John Boorman’s Where the Heart Is. Embarrassing Sandler is such a snide miscalculation that Baumbach undermines his ultimate sarcastic diagnosis: that Hollywood (America) withholds “permission to be human.”
Baumbach’s contrast between winners and losers, Kelly/Clooney’s professional past (including an on-set love scene where his female co-star farts) and his non-communicative domestic present, comes off as merely hateful, much like Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories.
When Sandler tells Kelly/Clooney, “Look at you, you’re the American dream, the last of the old movie stars,” Baumbach seems trapped in his own dishonest fantasy, attempting to fashion a glamorous Willy Loman out of a self-sentimentalizing Hollywood egotist. “I’m just an actor, an actor who got famous,” Kelly/Clooney apologizes. Yet the final sequence of him teary-eyed at a montage reel of his own film clips treats moviegoers as bumpkins. Jay Kelly is a movie about a fraud, made by frauds.
