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At the Venice Film Festival they showed a charming tragicomedy by Noah Baumbach starring George Clooney. Film critic Sonya Vselyubska admired the film.
The main character of the film, Jay Kelly, is a superstar on the scale of George Clooney himself, who plays this role. For over 35 years of his career, Kelly worked in numerous films, gaining world recognition and wonder without wasting either kindness or prudence. On the Maidan, Jay is always attentive, giving the robot a try to give the maximum, often with the good will of the director about another take. Well, that’s how the film begins: a great significant Maidan, over which the camera flies, recording the preparations until the final scene – the death of the hero Jay Kelly. Having scored a good take, the group bursts into tears, and Jay is a perfectionist and asks for another try. The most important person on his great team is Ron (Adam Sandler), the longtime manager who encourages Kelly through her early career. As a true professional, you are capable of solving any problem, and as a friend, you are in charge of important matters.
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But for such success Jay paid a great price to the special agent. Low separation, two grown-up daughters: the older one is traumatized by her long-term work, and the younger one, instead of spending time with her father, travels with her boy to Europe. His friend and colleague Ron is also the most important person in the life of his children.
In one morning, Jay explains the whole plan and plans to go to Europe: to pay the city for the deposit at the cinema (which he had previously ignored) and suddenly catch up with the bottom, cutting off the train right before his train in France. Haunted by this twist, the team starts to follow him, and the PR agent (Laura Dern) screams: “I can’t put Jay Kelly on the ropes!”
American director Noah Baumbach turns to Lido with a new line taken from his partnership with Netflix. The 2022 festival opened with the film “White Noise” – a surreal story about the end of the world, which, however, disappointed the public, failed at the box office and did not receive lukewarm reviews. Naresha Baumbach turns to what is best in the new – large-scale Hollywood dramas with a penetrating script and brilliant actors. After all, we fell in love with his “Love Story,” and “Jay Kelly” has every chance of achieving no less recognition.
“Jay Kelly” is a first impression of the greatness of the Hollywood machine, a film that gives you a glimpse of what is happening on the cinema squares in the very heart of Los Angeles – the scene of the flights and fall, well known to Baumbach himself and his squad of Gerti Gervіґ, which also appears in the film. The incredible trust of Netflix and generous budgets allowed the director to visually create a tale of Hollywood – with studios, trailers and luxurious apartments. But Baumbach’s main merit here is that, as a result of his screenwriting talent, he divided this tale into friends, turning it into a mountain, an old parable, like cinema itself, about the difficult reality of the acting profession.
You might think that “Jay Kelly” is a damn pretentious story about the problems of the rich and famous. And so it could have been, as if the dose of humor was not generous to the actor’s business. Constantly self-ironic heat about the status of the star, mutual caps and absurdly appropriate scenes transform the drama into a tragicomedy, without ruining the empathy for the hero’s experience. Jay Kelly's crisis speaks to the very heart of existential nutrition: who really deserves it after all these peculiarities and what kind of damage there was on the family front? His compulsive attempts to flow into himself, the past and the present, wandering around him up to speed with other people, in whom he searches not only for his reaction to his person, but also for his patterns of emotions and behavior, the simplicity of which he has long ago having spent
Now he looks back at his journey to the cinema, the succession of incidents, successes and boastfulness. Baumbach does not go into flashbacks, but combines them into a single mise-en-scène. Jay Kelly can leave the toilet on the train – and drink in the past, at the first great tests, like wine, for example, if he “beat” a friend, and now remembers about it with tears in his eyes.
It’s hard to keep an eye on the dynamics of the tandem of George Clooney and Adam Sandler, as they have different acting backgrounds. Sandler adds his own brand of comedy, as well as his fresh interest in complex, lyrical characters in the crisis, which he inspired in the Sefdi brothers' Uncut Costs. But it is most obvious that without George Clooney this film simply would not have been successful, and even his character here is particularly magnetic: the generosity, dedication, and natural charm of his appearance add a metaphorical versatility to this image. This connection from reality is no longer reinforced in the finale, when the hero decides to take back his city for the contribution from the cinematography, and on the screen they show a montage of the same roles of Cluny – from “Ocean's Eleven” and “After reading, burn” to “The Thin Line of Hearts” and “As I enter the Svitanka” is a true hymn to the richness of his acting talent.
And the story of Jay Kelly does not repeat the corollaries of Cluny’s special life, and his very courage to gain power to become a metaphor for the main character transforms the look at the main dilemma of the film: to lose oneself is a “hot cry”, as refers to the quote from Sylvia Plath on the beginning of the picture. This problem is forbidden to go far beyond the boundaries of the lives of Hollywood stars.
