A bottle of limoncello, a rustling bag of porchetta-flavored chips, my jet-lagged wife beside me, and our cherubic ten-month-old asleep in the next room. That’s how I watched Jay Kelly last week in an apartment in Trastevere, the old bohemian quarter across the Tiber where ochre walls peel like sunburnt skin and someone always seems to be arguing or singing beneath your window.
George Clooney plays the eponymous leading man in a role cut from his own cloth. Jay is a dashing movie star nearing the age when tributes start outnumbering offers, but what haunts him isn’t the prospect of his career slowing down. It’s that the relationships that were supposed to justify it have thinned into formalities. Wife? Long gone (both of them). His older daughter wants little to do with him. His younger one will see him, but she won’t choose him — not when there’s anywhere else to be. His father hovers at the margins — never quite proud, never quite absent. His only real companions are the help, especially his manager, Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler), a man who has dedicated three decades to Jay’s career and is only now beginning to reckon the toll it’s taken on him.
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