Noah Baumbach needs to try harder: Jay Kelly reviewed

Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly stars George Clooney as a handsome movie star playing a handsome movie star who has an identity crisis and is forced to reflect on his life. It’s being sold as a Hollywood satire, but it’s far too affectionate to be biting, and contains moments where it drowns in schmaltz. For a director of Baumbach’s calibre (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha), it all feels like very low-hanging fruit. That said, it’s not such an ordeal to spend a couple of hours in the company of Clooney as the golden Tuscan sunshine beats down (it’s mostly filmed in Italy). I found I could cope.

The film opens with a quote from Sylvia Plath: ‘It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be someone else.’ Stall set out, we can safely say. Jay Kelly is wildly famous and wealthy and lives in one of those stunning mid-century houses basking in the Hollywood hills. (There’s no shame in sticking around for some lifestyle porn.) Yet Kelly hasn’t been so successful on the relationship front. All his marriages have ended in divorce. He is estranged from one daughter (Riley Keough) and while he’d like to spend the summer with his younger one (Grace Edwards), she’s chosen to travel to Europe. His only friend is his devoted manager Ron (a terrific Adam Sandler), but if you’re paying someone 15 per cent, are they truly your friend? He attends the funeral of the director (Jim Broadbent, seen in flashback) who gave him his first break. Here, he encounters Timothy (Billy Crudup), the fellow acting student with whom he roomed before he become famous. It is not a happy reunion. Anger and resentment surface. There are fisticuffs. Did he steal Timothy’s career? Is he a bad person? Can you have a go again at life, like you can in the movies, when you’re unhappy with the first take? Can you do it better?

In other words, the movie doesn’t ask questions that haven’t been asked before. Chief among these: where does celebrity end and the real person begin? You wait for the film to improve, become more incisive. Instead it becomes a jaunty road trip as Kelly impulsively decides to attend an event to honour him in Italy, an invitation he’d previously turned down. His entourage, which includes his publicist (Laura Dern), are expected to drop everything to accompany him. The central portion of the film is a train ride across the Tuscan landscape during which he experiences flashbacks to his youth as, one by one, his employees decide that they have lives of their own and desert him. (Only loyal Ron remains.) Are the only people who actually like him the ones who don’t know him (he’s adored by his fans)?

There are decent lines and comic moments, even if some of the running gags overstay their welcome. And it is sumptuously filmed – a feast for the eyes and all that. But there is no real propulsion or tension, and it’s too happy to sit back and bask in Clooney’s charisma, as the timeless, old-school movie star. It’s what he is, and what he’s being called upon to play, but there’s no twist in here somewhere. What are we even meant to think of Jay Kelly? Is he an asshole or not? I couldn’t work it out.