Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach, 2025)

[domino harvey]

Baumbach’s next film will star Adam Sandler and … George Clooney(!) (and co-written with Emily Mortimer)

[The Narrator Returns]

Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, and Riley Keough have joined the cast.

[The Narrator Returns]

And so have Mortimer, Greta Gerwig, Eve Hewson, Jim Broadbent, Patrick Wilson, Isla Fisher, Stacy Keach, Lars Eidinger, and many more.

[therewillbeblus]

Including both Alba Rohrwacher and Alba Rohrwacher

[The Narrator Returns]

Officially called Jay Kelly, in theaters November 14 and Netflix December 5.

[brundlefly]

Teaser.

[Yakushima]

Teaser.

Looks promising!

[therewillbeblus]

I mostly enjoyed this, but there's no question it's Baumbach-lite, accompanied by more classic sentimentality even with the Baumbach Bite. There's something a bit frustrating about how thin and fleeting all the dramatic moments feel. I get that Baumbach is in Fellini mode, essentially doing his personally-removed version of 8 1/2, and that reflecting egocentricity's consequence of moments existing as slight, passing ships in the night is fitting for the material. Still, that doesn't necessarily make for a rich film - and it's super weird seeing all of these bigger actors in cameo roles.. This is a movie begging for more fat on its bone, which might've given us the Baumbach messiness some of us have been craving for a while. Instead it's mostly just fine, with bits of greatness sewn in. I liked the universality of how Baumbach frames remembering a romantic encounter and wondering if the other person remembers it the same way, or the depiction of conversations around generational trauma within family systems - particularly how, even when making the most earnest attempt at healing, the parent often defaults to defensiveness and just can’t get out of their own way. And while the final montage didn't give me the 'feels' like my other audience members, the final line certainly did. The humor is uncomfortably inconsistent and probably won't play very well on television sets streaming, but when it hits, it usually strikes the right chord. Sandler is the MVP, as expected, but even he is begging for more to do. Billy Crudup is also terrific and completely embodies his tragic role in a surprising fashion (I’ve always liked him as an actor but I don’t think he’s ever played a character in this vein). I couldn't help but feel like this script was itching for another draft, which probably aided my irritation - so it probably sounds like I didn't like the film when I really did, but I think there's just something extra annoying about a movie that could be great and yet falls drastically short of that credit

[untitled]

I was really looking forward to this. I always enjoy Baumbach's work (except Barbie which I believe is the only thing he's been involved with that I haven't seen.) "Jay Kelly" seemed like a great idea on paper and looked good in the trailers, but ultimately it came out under-baked, almost like a first draft of a movie (as Blus alluded to.) It's a damn shame, really, given the talent and the expense.

I can take or leave Clooney, so it wasn't about him. I generally like Sandler in his more serious roles (Punch Drunk Love, Uncut Gems, and even in his lightly comedic turns like Baumbach's own Meyerowitz Stories) but I don't have much use for his 'funny' movies. Both Clooney and Sandler did fine with the script they had which was, let's say, something less than fine.

And, for some reason Stacy Keach really rubbed the wrong way as Kelly's father. I can't say why but it was not in the this is the way the character is supposed to be way. I DID like Jim Broadbent in his role.

Quibbles--not really plot spoilers:

Spoiler

: Sandler's character refers to other people as 'puppy' (a lot) which oddly bugged me and Clooney (Kelly) and his father refer to each other as 'studly' (as a nickname, not the characteristic.) Both wore thin.

I can't tell you to watch it or not, but I'm disappointed by it.

[swo17]

This didn't feel much like a Baumbach film but it grew on me. It's got some heart and heft to it. I feel like a lot of Academy voters are going to see themselves in this...

[pianocrash]

I'd like to think this whole operation is a gauntlet thrown down to Apatow for a full Kim Kelly feature film to materialize, but I don't think either filmmaker is interested in a) gauntlet throwing or b) making movies people actually want to see (complimentary).

[Matt]

Can't say I liked this much at all. Despite the on-the-nose picture of Marcello Mastroianni that fills the frame near the end, I wouldn't say the film feels as inspired by 8½ (and Wild Strawberries) as much as it is inspired by Deconstructing Harry (and Stardust Memories). Or any number of Henry Jaglom films. But run those influences through a Brita filter until they run clear, then mix in a hefty portion of studio notes and you get this film. So, so many cliches in play here: the road trip that's really a journey of self-discovery, the man (literally) running away from his life, the memories overlapping and seemingly indistinguishable from current reality, the man who everybody (except anyone who actually knows him) loves, the friends we made along the way, the blue collar father who never understood his artistic son, the kids neglected by the parent whose career always comes first (x3), the man experiencing a moment of true abandon in the middle of a dance party, etc. The extended love-fest on the train was so embarrassingly corny. I'd say it was like something out of a Richard Curtis movie, but I like Richard Curtis movies a lot more than this and he would have done it a lot better! That the movie has the audacity to show clips from Clooney's actual movies at the end only makes you wish you had spent your time watching Three Kings or Michael Clayton or Out of Sight (or even The Peacemaker!) instead.

You can't say it's a bad movie because every actor in it (except maybe Mrs. Baumbach) is very good and every collaborator (Linus Sandgren, Nicholas Britell, Mark Tildesley, et al) is elite, but it's let down by its script and direction. Baumbach has always been the king of unlikeable characters. Jay Kelly is an unlikeable character, but the movie desperately needs you to like him. Problem is there's just nothing there to like, and Baumbach seems unable to capture that thousand-watt charm that's gotten Clooney through so many thin roles before.

I've seen many people say that this movie should have been about Adam Sandler's character. A movie about sacrificing your life to an egotist who comes to realize that you're his only friend would definitely be more interesting, but I'm not sure Baumbach would have had any interest in making that movie.

[Walter Kurtz]

That movie has already been made. It's called Hacks. All 37 episodes of it.

[therewillbeblus]

(or even The Peacemaker!)

I did think it was funny how this was the movie with the most clips in the slideshow, though humor was not the tone that scene was going for

[Roger Ryan]

Can't say I liked this much at all. Despite the on-the-nose picture of Marcello Mastroianni that fills the frame near the end, I wouldn't say the film feels as inspired by 8½ (and Wild Strawberries) as much as it is inspired by Deconstructing Harry (and Stardust Memories). Or any number of Henry Jaglom films...

With so much of the running time spent on that train ride, it occurred to me that Jay Kelly is very similar to Satyajit Ray's The Hero (1966), itself a Felliniesque-style drama about a marquee film star taking a train to an awards ceremony with surrealistic flashbacks showing how the film star got his start and the ways he may have betrayed people along the way. Clooney's Kelly never seems too bothered by the reminiscing, at least not to the degree that Uttam Kumar's
Mukherjee is in the Ray film, which is a major reason why Sandler's character becomes the more interesting one in the second half of this film. Jay Kelly starts with a good concept (the actor whose approach to acting is all surface becomes worried he is as superficial as his approach to his craft) but that concept is better realized in the trailer than in the film itself. The bar scene with Crudup is excellent as is the Eve Hewson scene but too much of the rest of the film plays a little too lightly, making that final moment come off as unearned and heavy-handed.

[diamonds]

Jay Kelly is an unlikeable character, but the movie desperately needs you to like him. Problem is there's just nothing there to like

Is it true though, that the film needs us to like him? I think what you say next, that "there's just nothing there to like," is onto something about Baumbach's game.

Jay Kelly is new territory for Baumbach in that the character Jay Kelly is a flip on some of the father figures that came before him in the Baumbach filmography. Unlike Harold Meyerowitz, the "failed" sculptor always grumbling about his lack of recognition or his more successful colleagues, or Jeff Daniels's failed novelist in The Squid and the Whale, Jay Kelly has been granted the one thing they so desired: success beyond his wildest dreams. Yet somehow he and his relationships with family, friends, and colleagues are still dysfunctional. The first encounter he has with his former acting school classmate prompts him to remember that his life is founded on an act of plagiarism, something that occurs with disconcerting frequency in Baumbach's work (Mr. Jealousy, While We're Young, Mistress America).

So, so many cliches in play here: the road trip that's really a journey of self-discovery, the man (literally) running away from his life, the memories overlapping and seemingly indistinguishable from current reality […] the man experiencing a moment of true abandon in the middle of a dance party

I think you're correct here that Baumbach is appropriating certain cliches. But what is the true nature of this journey of self-discovery? As the film goes on and we observe more and more of these flashbacks, I found there to be a nagging sense that there really is nothing there to Jay Kelly, that he truly is an "empty vessel" as one of his daughters puts it.

It's particularly felt in the Daphne (Eve Hewson) flashback scene. Kelly begins speaking to the memory in front of him with a kind of wistfulness, but we're entirely distanced from his emotions. I think this is purposeful; I don't believe Baumbach means for us to share his feelings and sympathize with him. His affair with an actress is a silly, weightless thing, especially coming right after Ron's phone call with his family about his daughter's hospital trip. This is a great little scene, full of Baumbachian rhythm and detail: Ron making them laugh over the phone ("Michael Bronfman is an asshole"), doing his best to keep up in a 3-on-1 situation, making heartfelt reassurances that they'll get through it okay. And Gerwig works wonders throughout: despairing over the unsuccessful medicinal steps taken ("We slathered it and we did the Advil"); swearing and blowing a kiss to the red light she ran and immediately turning around to apologize to their son for cussing; flashing a loving smirk at their son when he says, "Dad, I think I might love Mom more."

This is the stuff of real familial love, everyday love that isn't glamorous or illicitly thrilling. Baumbach plays it in counterpoint with Kelly's reminiscence, which is nothing: a fake love scene, a fake family, the memory of using the kid actor as a pretense to spend time with Daphne while his wife and newborn daughter are at home—ouch!

Late in the film, there's something of an emotional climax between Kelly and Ron at the venue the night before the retrospective:

Spoiler

At this point in the "self-discovery" narrative, Kelly has become disillusioned with a life devoted to his movie star career at the expense of his family and relationships. It should be a breakthrough, and his decision to refuse his next role should be an assertion of his newfound freedom and an embrace of what truly matters in life. Except that Baumbach & Emily Mortimer have dovetailed it with the Sandler plot-line and created a nasty double bind: there is an irony to the fact that in this moment he must continue his career—which he has now realized is empty and unfulfilling—in order to preserve the only friendship he has left. Even his personal breakthrough is constrained as a selfish act, and his "moment of true abandon" ends up being one of the least cathartic dance sequences one could imagine.

What happens at the end of the film?

Spoiler

Kelly wins a small victory by coaxing Ron to attend the ceremony with him. Throughout the film, Kelly has been hemorrhaging friends & family; he has momentarily stemmed the bleeding. The stage feels set for the grand redemption he's been seeking, but it doesn't come. The clips chosen from Clooney's career aren't Clooney highlights, but "Jay Kelly" action movies, moments of romance and suaveness and triumph that mean nothing to him. (I think one could certainly read some dark humor into the clips chosen.) Baumbach plays up the irony by cutting to audience members who are clearly moved by the scenes, and to Kelly, who isn't. Unable to find the solace he's looking for on the screen, he looks around the auditorium and sees a mixture of ghosts, people who have walked out of his life, and bridges he's burned.

Then comes the coup de grâce: the "Kelly & Kellyyy Show" home movie, the cruelest reminder of lost time. We watch it and recall how each of his daughters have exited the film. His youngest Daisy has seen him off with a, "See you, Dad. Love ya," that plainly means less than Kelly's "Love you too," reply, and like Laura Dern's character after kissing Ron, she doesn't look back as the bus pulls away. The eldest daughter's farewell is even more brutal, with Baumbach staging the scene by ripping her out of the frame and having her voice suddenly become telephonic again for a halfhearted "I hope you have a good tribute. Goodbye Jay." Baumbach has written many, many hurtful lines of dialogue in his career, but surely that one ranks among the most lacerating.

So the film ends with neither daughter granting him absolution. His last friend has made it clear he can't continue their partnership. When the lights go up and Kelly is treated to a standing ovation, it's clearly an ironic moment. I find this ending among Baumbach's bleakest: a completely hollow, lonely man who has only realized far too late that he fucked up his life.

I'm still trying to decide how successful the movie is overall; there are plenty of things that give me pause. But I don't think the ending is sentimental or that Baumbach has "gone soft," as it were. One could even say it uses the veneer of a sentimental, autumnal journey-under-the-Tuscan-sun to sneak in some of his darkest material since the pre-Gerwig days.

[Walter Kurtz]

Best read so far. Nice job!

[Altair]

I wish I'd seen the film diamonds describes: certainly all the material is there, but none of it landed in this devestating, existential way: Jay Kelly is likeable, an arsehole who is charming and charismatic, powered by Clooney's charm. Sandler's character is out of a sitcom - indeed, the whole film feels like a nice HBO sitcom: everybody is beautiful, all the character dynamics are predictable, tragedy and comedy are mixed-up together: it's weightless, inoffensive, amusing, overlong, under-written, over-shot, cruising by like a nice car, without leaving a mark behind.

[starmanof51]

I read the ending as Jay loving his tribute, enthralled again by everything he's gotten to do, and expressing the wish to do it all over again. Not hesistantly, like at the end of takes, where he wonders if there wasn't something better he could have done, but with joy - he wants to go again on the exact same ride. It was just a little earlier that we heard him tell his daughter that the way he did it was the only way it can be done. The Kelly and Kelly Show may be a little cute, but also they sucked. If there's character change here it's self-acceptance. This is like A Christmas Carol where Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning and realizes the ghosts were full of shit.

[Walter Kurtz]

The perfect movie! Everyone sees what they want to see. Sorta like the world.

[therewillbeblus]

Great reading, diamonds. I'm not sure the film pulls it off, but I believe your take is what Baumbach was at least intending to accomplish

[The Narrator Returns]

I'm glad diamonds got to be the first to forward this read of the movie, I agree and wouldn't have put it so well myself (he even covered Greta sucking up to the red-light camera). I read a Baumbach profile with a funny bit of him reacting to the line that Greenberg depicts him at his worst (after Squid and Margot did that for his parents), where he thinks it "was just him as he was at the time, without any kind of opinion attached at all". I think it speaks to how that can turn out scathing but ultimately sympathetic while this is sappy but with a bitter aftertaste, which plays intentional or like an unaddressed bug depending on the person. I'm not 100% it's what Baumbach was "intending" but either he's happy to leave the emotional impressions up to the viewer or he's had to have gotten used to his intentions not lining up with what the audiences see.

Spoiler

Baumbach's post-Gerwig softening has led to a shift towards family as an ultimately steady rock even amidst the bile and hurt that also occurs within the family. Marriage Story ends as peacefully as it can because the family survives the marriage, White Noise somehow flips "Family is the cradle of the world's misinformation" into something almost cozy. But this is pitifully out-of-reach for Jay, only moreso as he keeps trying to fix things. The little thing that killed me on second watch was him on the train with his daughter, when his attention wanders from her to her boyfriend filming her hands; "All my memories are movies" sounds nice unless "...instead of people" is at the end. The Sandler subplot definitely contrasts with its warm, unforced family chaos, and even just in the casting within both Sandler and Baumbach's own families. Few people are as famously intent on being with their family even on a movie-star schedule than Sandler, and that final Kelly and Kellyyyy! show reminded me of Gerwig's conception of the Marches' playacting. Does Jay want that unbreakable family bond or does he half-want it just like the daughters say he does? Those final lines are easy to read in many different ways (I can't say starman's way ever would've occurred to me) but it only seems to me like a sad, impossible request, brought on by Leatherheads footage (Good German also a funny one to spotlight, very little movie-magic comfort to be gleamed from that). It seems important that Sandler's no longer seen with him in those last moments, now the most alone one can be in a sea of clapping people. Stop the world, I want to get off.