‘Jay Kelly’ Review: Fame Comes at a Reflective, Personal Price in Noah Baumbach’s Newest Masterpiece [A-] Telluride
“All my memories are movies” says the titular Jay Kelly (George Clooney) to his mentor, veteran director Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent) as they stand in Kelly’s kitchen as the older, wiser gentleman makes the movie star a pretty damn good sandwich. The statement is made in reference to Kelly talking about his relationship with his children, and how as they have grown up and blossomed into the women they have or about to become, he’s been gone, making movies, creating lasting memories for audiences around the world, but losing out on the chances to experience the wonderful, personal moments of life found in front of him. This is the main point of the conversation writer-director Noah Baumbach is wrestling with within his latest comedy-drama about how the thing we love, the movies, have a heavy price to pay on one’s soul and if it was all worth it in the end.
Baumbach throws us right into the action as Jay is filming his latest film, his last day on set. As he is performing his death scene to wrap the film, behind the camera is his manager Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler), who is talking to his daughter about their upcoming father/daughter tennis match. As both of those things are going on, see the other various people within Jay’s life on set, like his stylist Candy (Emily Motimer, who co-wrote the script alongside Baumbach), as well as the entire crew working to get that final shot so they can call it a wrap. So when things settle on set, and Ron tells his daughter to hold one second, the lights turn on and we see Jay Kelly, a movie star built from the past that thrives on the work that he once did and continues to work solely because it’s all that he has; basically the old expression, if you stop then you’re dead. Clooney is the perfect person to play Kelly, as he himself is a classic movie star at the turning point of his career, where he has scaled back his workload to focus on his family, taking a more of a role over the last decade behind the camera than in front. In real life, Clooney figured out what his character here has to explore over the course of the film, that there is more to life than the glamour of Hollywood and lights, camera, action of it all. Any comparisons to Clooney and the character here are rendered moot as Clooney is known as one of the nicest, hardest working men in the industry, and his character, while sharing similar qualities of work ethic, Kelly is more a thorny, selfish person than the man playing him, making Clooney’s work here some of the most fascinating, layered, venerable of his career.
After he wraps the film, he returns to his home in LA, where he hopes to spend time with his youngest daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) before she heads off to college in the fall. But Daisy has already made plans with her friends to go to Europe for the summer, figuring her “always working” father would be making a movie as she went on her trip. But this isn’t the only disappointing news of Jay’s day, as Ron comes over to his house and tells him of Peter’s sad departure from this Earth. In the earlier mentioned scene where Jay and Peter are together, the culmination of that scene is about Peter begging Jay to agree in one final film for him, given that his last couple of films flopped and they needed a “big name” to attach themselves to the project. When Jay refuses to give Peter the break that the director once gave him, it lingers in Kelly’s mind the day of the funeral, as well as when he gets to reconnect with his old acting buddy Timothy (Billy Crudup). In getting a drink and catching up on old times, Crudup delivers some of the best work of his career in just one scene, as we slowly come to realize that Kelly’s entire career is based on stealing the role that Timothy auditioned for (we even see this audition scene play out in a flashback with Jay and Timothy portrayed by Charlie Rowe and Louis Partridge, both of whom are excellent). While Timothy has had a successful life as a therapist and was home every night to tuck his kids in at night, his envy for Kelly’s success has grown over the years and unravels right before our eyes, leading to the two having a fist fight in the parking lot of the bar. In exploring the role of success and the sacrifices that come with it, Baumbach and Mortimer expertly use Timothy as the sad, bitter, frustrated, heartbroken souls that lost out on their chance for greatness, and their memories are not on the big screen, but thirty years before in a small room where everyone had hope before time took their shot away of using their talent.
The next day, as Ron and his daughter are about to serve match point for the tennis match, his wife Lois (Greta Gerwig, in a brief but hilarious role) answers his phone and its Liz (Laura Dern), Jay’s publicist, calling because Jay wants to drop out of his next film to go and follow (or some would say stalk) Daisy around Europe. Ron, regretfully has to answer and rushes over to Jay’s place to get him to make the movie and not allow him to go on this trip, but the actor’s mind is already made up when he arrives and thus team Jay Kelly set off for Paris and then Italy, where Kelly will take a detour to accept a lifetime achievement award (a prize that he turned down several times after Ron offered it to him) in Tuscany. For the better part of thirty years, Ron and Liz have been by Jay’s side, creating the man, the myth, the legend that is Jay Kelly, but Ron is different than Liz, as he sees his relationship with the actor as more of a friend or brother than someone who takes 15% of his check for every time he makes a movie (a statistic brought up a couple of times throughout the film to rather devastating results). These two, who shared more than just a professional relationship, but once a romantic connection that could’ve changed the course of their lives but because of their jobs, their flame fizzled. Sandler and Dern are perfect together as two powerful lost souls stuck in a job where their personal and professional ambitions, wants, desires are put on pause because of every little thing that happens to Jay. They both come to realize in their own way that they’ve given up too much in the pursuit of someone else’s success, and at some point, enough becomes enough, and things have to change.
As the trip takes itself to Italy, not only does Jay come to terms with the fact that his time with Daisy is gone, as she is falling in love with a young French director, wanting to explore the country sides of Europe from the back of a broken down bus, but recollects back to losing his time with his other daughter Jessica (Riley Keough). Within a brilliant use of flashback sequences, as well as a scene involving a phone call that takes place across two continents yet the father and daughter stand in front of one another to air out their remaining reconciliation and regrets, Baumbach taps into the harsh reasons why this relationship is on the rocks and won’t be able to be fixed with just a simple phone call. When Jay continued to make films, he made choice to entertain audiences around the world, filling them with memories of a man that is a hero on screen and in real like; he literally chases after a man on the train that is attempting to steal an old woman’s purse in a hilarious sequence that felt in the vein of one of Baumbach’s former collaborators and friends, Wes Anderson. Much like Anderson’s film from earlier this year, The Phoenician Scheme, Baumbach is exploring legacy, mortality, and the bonds we make with the people in our life.
As someone who has made films for three decades, Baumbach humor and cynical tone takes a back seat here to explore the most empathetic characters he’s ever created, imprinting his views of the emotional toll it takes on a soul to make cinema and continue to keep the spark of imagination alive for himself and everyone that sees his films. In Jay’s case, as he is traveling throughout the film, he explores his past in several sequences where he looks at the incident with Timothy, a love interest from a previous movie (which include Baumbach in a hysterical cameo as the film director who is the intimacy coordinator at the same time), and a previous visit with Jessica to a pretty far out therapist (Kicking and Screaming’s Josh Hamilton in a pretty unrecognizable role). Even his father (Stacy Keach) doesn’t want to be around him, even though we can clearly see where Jay’s allergy to being a present parent comes from as Mr. Kelly is a brash, selfish old man who doesn’t think what he son does is worth his time to praise. When you add it all up, even though Jay has all of these people around him to get him water or make sure he has a slice of cheesecake ready for him when her arrives (which he hates cheesecake but it shows up hilariously numerous times within the film), his hypothesis is correct; he is lonely but it’s what he does from where on that can hopefully can spark some change within him.
The only person Jay really has is Ron, and within the film, we see some of the best on-screen chemistry of the year between Clooney and Sandler’s excellent performances. And within Jay’s realization of the lonely, prickly man he’s become, we see Ron fully becoming aware that Jay and he are in a transaction relationship, built on the back of work, not a meaningful human connection as friends. But it’s the movies folks, and we know in stories like this, it works out okay for them in the end, and in this case, it’s vastly necessary to these men’s conclusions about their lives. They do need each other, they have built something together, and with this, the end results are the dozens of credits we see at the tribute, the work that dazzles moviegoers. Jay and Ron built that, and within this film, Clooney and Sandler are perfect together, diving deep into a friendship that took the long way around in finding the emotional purpose to why they can’t live without the other, and why they are as much of family as the people they leave at home.
Baumbach, alongside the help of Mortimer, has made one of the best films of the year as well as a defining achievement in his celebrated, 30-year career. In examining the relationships made within our work, he peels back the onion of Hollywood that we rarely get to see, that while everyone loves the process of delivering films to the world, there are real sacrifices that have to be made in order to entertain. As I’m writing this review, there was a choice as a writer I made to come to a film festival across the country and take time away from my family in order to deliver this to you, the reader. What memories have I missed out on, what moment back at home is incomplete without my presence, will I have regrets in doing this like Jay Kelly? The simple answer for me is no, I have an understanding partner who allows me to do this. But for the characters in the film, the stakes are bigger, and the emotions are just as human as mine or anyone who worked on the film, including Baumbach himself. At the same time, as he is demonstrating empathy for his characters, the industry he works in, and the challenges it takes to find happiness in entertaining the world, Jay Kelly is a celebration of film and the power it can have on one’s life, making you laugh, cry, and think about the memories we’ve all made at the movies.
Grade: A-
This review is from the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release Jay Kelly in select theaters on November 14 and streaming on December 5.
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