If you were to cut all utterances of the words “Jay” and “Kelly” and all mentions of the pitfalls of fame out of the movie “Jay Kelly,” it would last five minutes.
Alas, writer-director Noah Baumbach’s one-note showbiz flick, which is having its local premiere in the New York Film Festival, repeats itself ad nauseam.
“My life doesn’t feel real,” bemoans Jay Kelly, one of the biggest screen stars on the planet, who’s played by George Clooney, one of the biggest screen stars on the planet.
“Is there a person in there? Maybe you don’t actually exist,” echoes his longtime manager Ron (Adam Sandler).
The meh-ta semi-comedy, co-written by Emily Mortimer, even starts with the Sylvia Plath quote, “It’s much easier to be somebody else.”
We get it, we get it.
Underlining that this is celebrity navel-gazing on an Olympian scale, midway through, Clooney stares into the mirror of a train bathroom and says “Jay Kelly” over and over. Occasionally, he peppers in “Robert De Niro” or “Cary Grant.”
It’s not a stretch to imagine the actor muttering “George Clooney” a bunch of times at a looking glass at his home in Lake Como.
At this point, Jay’s falling apart. The director who discovered him, Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), has just died. And after 35 years in his glamorous job, his home life has been subsumed by his public persona, and he has no idea who he actually is. But we 100% do. It’s obvious.
Jay is a sad man who regrets choosing his IMDB page over his kids now that they’re grown up and resentful. He can’t distinguish between employees and actual friends. He believes his stardom to be a fluke. All of these ideas are old hat. Bowler-hat old.
Despite the movie journeying from Los Angeles to Paris to Tuscany and sometimes decades into the past, the title character’s path couldn’t be more direct or less bumpy.
Perhaps Baumbach and Mortimer are saying that being a boldfacer is not as exciting as we think. However, that premise is not as exciting as they think. Like many an A-Lister gliding across a red carpet, “Jay Kelly” is pretty and boring.
His beautiful existence is thrown further into chaos when an old acting class chum named Tim (Billy Crudup) resurfaces to tell Jay that he stole his career, girl and pretty much his entire life. Jay slugs him.
The best scene, actually, is a flashback to young Jay’s breakthrough audition at age 24, when he non-violently shoves his friendship with Tim aside in service of his ruthless ambition.
Back in the present, Jay is in crisis mode. And days after his younger daughter (Grace Edwards) jets to Europe with her friends on vacation, he spontaneously drops out of a hot movie project to stalk her overseas and run away from his assault.
Off he trots to the EU, which Baumbach occasionally forgets is in a different timezone than California.
The Parisian and Italian sceneries are Travel Channel soothing, though rolling vineyards and cobblestone streets can only do so much heavy lifting for the plot. They numb the senses like a nice Negroni. And the acting among the leads is, for the most part, strong as Campari.
Admittedly, I didn’t care for any of the annoyingly overzealous normal people Jay meets along the way.
And Laura Dern, as a high-strung publicist, just rehashes her divorce lawyer part in Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” to diminishing returns.
Sandler is good, though, and resists the urge to mimic Jeremy Piven in “Entourage.” Instead, he opts for a calmer, sweeter LA dealmaker. He’s the closest we come to caring about anybody. And Stacy Keach is amusing as Jay’s bombastic, boozehound, life-of-the-party dad.
Jay’s eldest daughter is sensitively played by Riley Keough as a woman dealing with being screwed up by her father. It’s a genuine and heartfelt performance. What’s odd, though, the character comes off less reasonable than her distant pop — and frequently less likable too.
She’s not the only one. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy watching nearly any of these people.
And, in that sense, the timing of “Jay Kelly” is unfortunate, because it’s partly a Hollywood satire of behind-the-camera Hollywood types similar to recent, far better Emmy winner “The Studio.”
None of them (Mortimer plays a stylist) are as witty or lovable as Kathryn Hahn, Catherine O’Hara and Seth Rogen are on the AppleTV+ series.
Their jokes aren’t particularly funny (a gag involving cheesecake gets old), and the emotional situations they grapple with (Ron and Liz were once an item) are hollow.
But what of the man of the hour(s)? Clooney is a tough nut to crack — and the movie seems to remark on his outward perfection.
At the start of “Jay Kelly,” his character is filming a death scene, which he’s able to snap out of in an instant. But, away from set and behind closed doors, his character and actorly artifice don’t change much at all until the very, very end. Clooney draws you in, but upon arrival there’s an emptiness.
Again, that could be the writers saying Jay the Celeb and Jay the Person have fused into a single show-business creature.
Or it could be that the direction and central performance lean too hard on star power and charisma, but lack detail and attentiveness.
Either way, as Jay observed at the start, none of it feels real.