Served by a parade of stars (George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Riley Keough, Patrick Wilson and even Alba Rohrwacher and Lars Eidinger), Noah Baumbach's new film is a bittersweet and timeless tale about Hollywood and its star-making machine.
For his fourth collaboration with Netflix, Noah Baumbach crafts the story of an actor, Jay Kelly (George Clooney), a shining star in the Hollywood firmament. The director of Marriage Story had already explored the torments of an artist in the prodigious Frances Ha in 2012. Jay Kelly is the inverted mirror image of Frances Ha , the other side of the same coin.
Frances Halladay (Greta Gerwig, who also appears in a small role in this new film) was a penniless, intellectual young woman in New York who dreamed of becoming a dancer and choreographer. Jay Kelly is an actor at the height of his fame in a city of appearances on the other side of the continent: Los Angeles. Frances Ha 's comedic universe grappled directly with reality, in the tradition of New York independent cinema. Jay Kelly , which takes place largely in Europe and on a train, is rooted in Italian comedy, as fierce as it is gentle and old-fashioned. Where Frances Ha deployed a luminous and soft black and white, like the films of the French New Wave, Jay Kelly is rich in shimmering and sometimes saturated colors, like a grand Technicolor melodrama. The comparisons could go on and on…
"I came to the casting call to accompany a friend..."
At the same time, the characters in both films—both artists, therefore—also have much in common. They carry within them that joyful melancholy common to young children and the elderly, poised between the fear of the end and the desire to begin again. It's an emotion they repress in the most surprising way: Frances and Jay are always in motion, in a rush, always on the go. But they often run into the void, as if trying to catch up with the irreversible ride of destiny. The world of art, and even more so that of cinema, is the ideal arena for such a variation on fate and the vagaries of life. One scene in Jay Kelly is particularly striking: Jay happens to run into Timothy (played by the ever-brilliant Billy Crudup, notably seen as a network executive in The Morning Show ), an old friend from his theater days, long before his fame. Like many, Timothy didn't continue acting. He's now a psychologist, leading a quiet life with a wife and children. Of all the people from that time, Jay is the only one who "made it." Pleasantly surprised by this unexpected encounter, Jay agrees to go with Timothy to a bar he frequents, a place with no security or protocol. Jay is happy to be back in a "real" bar, with "real" people, as he puts it. When they were both taking acting classes, Timothy had been selected for an audition. Overcome with stage fright, he had asked Jay, his best friend, to go with him. The rest of the story could be the plot of dozens of celebrity biographies. In the end, the auditionee was let go, and his friend, who had simply been an escort, was chosen for the role that launched his Hollywood career. The old friends remember this story with a certain smile—it all seems to be in the past. But Timothy isn't laughing: Jay had the luxury of putting that episode behind him, absorbed by the whirlwind of his meteoric career, but Timothy hasn't forgotten a thing. Every time he sees a film with Jay or his picture in the tabloids , it rekindles that painful memory. Everywhere he goes, Jay Kelly follows him, haunts him, like a cursed reminder of another life he might have had if things had turned out differently.
Cleverly, Noah Baumbach never places us in Timothy's resentful and sad position, but always in Jay's, the great innocent (a type of comedic role George Clooney is known for) who doesn't necessarily know how to react when things get out of hand and there won't be a second take. Although the film is set in the present day, Jay Kelly isn't a contemporary character, unlike Frances Ha: he's a timeless allegory for the Hollywood actor. And allegories are never meant to clash with reality.
