Earlier this year, while returning from the Cannes Film Festival, my wife nudged me and asked, “Is that Elle Fanning?” She was right. The actress who had been on the red carpet the night before, when her film Sentimental Value won the Grand Prix, was now at the airport, wearing headphones, carrying her suitcase, and looking as tired as everyone else. People began to notice her, and each time someone approached, she smiled politely and thanked them. Watching that, I thought about what Lady Gaga once said about fame, how it takes away the ability to simply exist. By embodying the characters and emotions that define our lives, actors lose their ability to be ordinary, even when all they want is to take a quiet nap at an airport gate.
Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach’s latest film, sets out to explore that loss of ordinariness. George Clooney plays Jay, a middle-aged Hollywood star shaken by the death of a colleague and an encounter with an old friend. He embarks on a European trip with his longtime manager Ron (Adam Sandler), following his estranged daughter while reflecting on what his life has become. Through flashbacks and comedic detours, Baumbach tries to show a man searching for meaning beyond fame, but the story feels too distant to truly connect.
The film’s premise seems to fit Baumbach’s usual themes of aging, ego, and self-mythology, but this time he feels out of his depth. As with White Noise, his previous film, he remains a director who mostly observes, rarely examining the “why” and focusing instead on the “what.” Because of that, his best work has always dealt with relatable human messiness such as divorces, insecurities, and the friction of everyday life. Here, the subject’s privilege creates a wall between the audience and the filmmaker’s intent. Jay’s struggles are too comfortable to provoke empathy, and by not digging deeper, the film ends up placing him on the same pedestal it wants to deconstruct.
Visually and tonally, Jay Kelly belongs to the early 2000s era of prestige drama, complete with piano-heavy score, slow introspection, and emotional monologues designed for awards. It recalls films like Finding Neverland, About Schmidt, and The Descendants, the kind of polished and respectable storytelling that now feels dated. Nicholas Britell’s music and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography are beautiful on their own but keep everything at a polite emotional distance. The humor feels forced, with the cheesecake joke not landing once, only finding brief rhythm when Alba Rohrwacher appears on screen.
Clooney plays the part with professionalism but is trapped in a script that constantly explains his emotions. There are plenty of reflective expressions but few genuine discoveries, as the character is never taken to interesting places. Sandler’s performance has been praised for restraint, though the character offers little beyond that. It would be disappointing if this were treated as profound simply because the actor is doing less. His character has no more depth than what we are used to seeing from him in his romantic comedies, and the film never seems certain of what he represents (envy? conscience?). He truly should have gotten that Oscar nomination for Uncut Gems. Among the cameos and smaller roles from Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Patrick Wilson, and Jim Broadbent, the only actor who truly leaves a mark is Billy Crudup in an early scene where the film pauses just to remind us what a great performer he is.
Ultimately, the film never truly lets us into Jay’s mind or meaningfully explores what fame does to a person. There are hints of interesting ideas about how art and film immortalize their time and their artists. One character remarks that Jay represents his entire life, but these observations always stay on the surface. The film’s emotional climax, where its meta commentary becomes even more self-aware through a montage featuring clips from Clooney’s past films, leans heavily on nostalgia and feels too self-congratulatory to carry any complexity. Jay Kelly needed to be either more self-critical or more visually daring. After recent years in which films have confronted identity and privilege more directly, such as Tár and, more recently, Sentimental Value, watching Baumbach observe from his velvet seat is not all that interesting.