Noah Baumbach's Jay Kelly doesn't have strawberries like Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. But it does have an aging man reflecting on his life as he travels to collect a lifetime achievement award. It also has pickles.
The pickles only appear in one scene, but they're important. In the first of the film's many flashbacks, mega-movie star Jay Kelly (played by mega-movie star George Clooney) remembers a visit from the director who, 35 years earlier, gave him his big break by casting him in his first role in something called Cranberry Street.
The director (Jim Broadbent) wants Jay to sign on for a new movie; the director needs the money and Jay's involvement alone will get the film funded. While the director makes his pitch, he makes Jay a sandwich. But the director doesn't know where to find the ingredients in Jay's massive kitchen, so the pitch keeps getting interrupted for his request for various toppings. The mayo is in the fridge, the tomatoes are over there. The pickles, they're probably in the pantry -- but check the expiration date, Jay warns.
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Pickles never expire, the director says. And anyway they smell fine. He finishes the sandwich and offers it to Jay, who takes a bite. It's good, he says. But he's still not going to make the director's movie. He repeats: Pickles never expire.
Ah, but people do. Hence their importance in Jay Kelly as a symbol of life's impermanence. Movies are a little like pickles. A great film will outlive every person who worked in it. So does that mean they're worth sacrificing years and all your important relationships to make one?
That's the question at the heart of Jay Kelly the film and Jay Kelly the character. As the movie begins, Kelly wraps one project and is about to start another. Now in his 60s, Jay barely speaks to his oldest daughter Jessica (Riley Keogh) and is getting ready send his youngest daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards) off to college.
Kelly has more money and success anyone could ever need, and more fame than anyone would ever want. And when Daisy decides to spent her last summer "at home" traveling Europe instead of spending time with her dad and his entourage of publicists, assistants, managers, stylists, and bodyguards, Jay realizes he will soon be left totally alone, sycophantic employees notwithstanding. He spirals out. What was the point of it all?
Searching for answers, Jay accepts a lifetime achievement award from an Italian film festival that he had previously turned down, and uses it as an excuse to chase his daughter through Europe. One by one, Kelly's team begin to question their quixotic quest to track down Daisy -- all except Kelly's most dedicated staffer, his manager Ron (Adam Sandler).
Ron would seemingly do anything for Jay, although his actions are not exactly selfless; keeping Jay happy and busy means more money for everyone. But his devotion seems to go beyond the concern every manager feels for their clients. Ron genuinely cares, not only about Jay but about the things Jay makes, to the point that Ron will drop everything when he gets a call from Jay (or, more likely, Jay's assistant or his publicist) in his hour of need. That includes leaving his own family behind -- including wife Lois (Greta Gerwig, Baumbach's real-life wife) -- to follow Jay to Europe.
Ron shows off the softer side that Sandler likes to use in his work with serious directors like Baumbach and James L. Brooks; subtle, quiet, sweet, and, in this case, totally in deference to Clooney in the central role. (Related question: When was the last time Adam Sandler was second-billed in one of his movies, as he is on Jay Kelly?) Sandler also gets most of Jay Kelly's funniest scenes, which involve his own unsuccessful attempts to balance his job with his commitments to his family.
The relatable comedy in those sections -- while Ron leaves Lois at home, the kids get sick and everyone is miserable -- offers a very welcome contrast to Jay's idealized pining for this glorious home life that he supposedly missed so he could make millions of dollars and blockbuster movies. Yes, family is important. But Ron's parts of Jay Kelly provide a nice reminder that the reality of family is a lot more complicated than the wistful fantasies of an isolated, out-of-touch movie star. (The movie's pro-family message is further complicated when Jay's own father, played by Stacy Keach, shows up to attend the film festival tribute.)
George Clooney may not be isolated or out-of-touch himself, but either way he is perfectly cast as Hollywood's biggest movie star. I used to do a lot of interviews and red carpets back when I worked for the Independent Film Channel. There was a five-year period where I spoke to just about every major star in Hollywood. And without hesitation, I can say with absolute certainty that the single most attractive person I interviewed in that period, male or female, was George Clooney. He didn't just look good; he exuded the ephemeral aura of a star. It felt like the temperature changed when he walked in a room.
Although Clooney has spent a lot of his career indulging his interests as a director and picking roles that cast him against type, when you put him in a great suit and do his hair just right (and apparently darken his eyebrows with a Sharpie) no one visually reads more like "The Greatest Movie Star Alive" than Clooney. And that other side of his persona, the side that likes to take creative chances and make movies about old timey football and emotionally-stunted assassins, serves him well in Jay Kelly, where that movie-star aura gradually gives way, revealing the depressed human being underneath and Clooney gets to drop his own smirky, happy-go-lucky facade.
Noah Baumbach makes thoughtful, good-looking movies, and Jay Kelly is no exception. (An opening oner that introduces the various characters and themes in a single long take touring around the set of Jay's latest movie is especially impressive.) Clooney and Sandler play off each other well, and there are several really good supporting turns, none better than Billy Crudup in the small but crucial role of Tim, an old friend of Jay's from his days as a struggling actor.
Crudup nails his big scene, when Tim obliges Jay and shows off some of the skills the pair honed together in acting class back in the day. Tim's own regrets about his life make the character a sort of Sliding Doors dark mirror image of Jay; yet another perspective on the push-and-pull between the personal and professional that Baumbach keeps interrogating in Jay Kelly from various angles. The first third of the film shifts from one highlight to the next; a great scene, an incredible monologue, a sharply observed quip.
Still, the longer Jay Kelly goes, the more it pushes those side stories to the margins to emphasize Jay and his bottomless self-absorption. That eventually becomes repetitive, and even a little tiresome. Baumbach offers some gentle mockery of Hollywood stars and their excessive egos and demands -- Jay's rider includes foods he doesn't even like -- but the final act pickles Jay Kelly's tragicomic vibe into something more overtly and excessively sentimental. Though I really admired parts of the film, by the last scene, I found myself asking a question: If movies are a waste of a life, why am I still watching this one?